The House will meet this evening to address a request from Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee to release to the public a memo written by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) and his staff. This memo—which has been the subject of an extended Republican campaign on Fox News and on social media—is being touted as containing major revelations concerning the FBI and Justice Department. Republicans have made claims that the memo will reveal a scandal “bigger than Watergate” and Sean Hannity declared that the information in the memo would kill Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s Russia connections.
But what is actually in the memo? Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu probably sums it up best.
The game Republicans are playing here isn’t hard to understand. The memo is based on classified material, and intentionally includes some of that material. That provides an excuse for why the memo needs to be “released.” It has given Republicans two weeks over which they could conduct a campaign on the premise that the memo was somehow being repressed, and that it contains secrets that Democrats don’t want anyone to see.
The truth is that Democrats are concerned about the fact that the memo has been so selectively edited that it gives a badly distorted view of the actual situation. And they’re concerned at the way the memo both reveals classified information and projects a political process onto the FISA court in a way that has Trump’s own Justice Department fighting to keep the memo hidden. But there’s little doubt that House Republicans will vote to send the memo to Trump, and even less that Trump will drop it on the public, complete with tweets about its earth-shaking awfulness.
Here’s what to expect.
The memo is about Carter Page
Carter Page, the same guy who Trump and every Trump surrogate has dismissed as a low-level volunteer, may seem like an unlikely hill on which Republicans would make their stand, but the information that has leaked so far about the memo’s contents indicate that Page is at the heart of the argument. Page was the subject of Russian recruitment going back to 2013.
For that reason, and many others connected to Page’s meetings with Russian officials, trips to Moscow, and involvement with the state-owned Russian oil and gas industry, Page was already the subject of FBI surveillance under a FISA warrant before he become part of the Trump campaign.
During 2016, the FBI sought a renewal of that warrant. And that application is the focus of the Nunes memo. The Nunes memo elevates the importance of that event, making it the “proof” of claims Trump made almost a year ago that the Obama administration was illegally “wiretapping” his campaign.
In fact, the best summary you’re likely to find of the Nunes memo in advance of its release is the checklist that Page produced during his genuinely bizarre House appearance. Leave out the supposed threats against Page, and this is pretty much the Nunes memo in a nutshell.
1) Any problem with the FISA Warrant against Page destroys the Russia investigation
The central contention, going back to Hannity’s statements that the Mueller investigation “is dead,” is that the FISA warrant against Page is the linchpin of the investigation. Though it’s not clear that information obtained through this warrant has affected or contributed to the investigation at all, that has to believed for the memo to have impact.
2) Using anything from Christopher Steele invalidates the warrant
Asked about FISA warrants during earlier testimony, James Comey indicated that getting a warrant from a FISA judge isn’t a matter of just asking.
Applications for FISA warrants, Comey said, are often thicker than his wrists, and that thickness represents all the work Justice Department attorneys and FBI agents have to do to convince a judge that such surveillance is appropriate in an investigation.
But the Nunes memo paints the FISA warrant as dependent on the document from Steele.
3) Steele’s information is invalid and can’t be used because it’s partisan
The testimony of Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson indicated that Steele was given no instructions when asked to look into Trump’s activities, that the documents would have no value if they had a partisan bias, and that bringing the documents to the FBI was Steele’s idea. Also, it showed that the meeting between Steele and the FBI came well after the FBI had opened an investigation into connections between Russia and the Trump campaign. But the Nunes memo is dependent on both the idea that the Steele documents are partisan hatchet jobs and key to the FBI investigation. Ironically, Carter Page confirmed the part of the documents likely used in his FISA warrant in his own testimony.
4) The FBI is engaged in a conspiracy against Trump
This is why Republicans have seized on and emphasized the personal notes flowing back and forth between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. For the Nunes memo to make any sense at all, the FBI has to be riddled with anti-Trump forces who were willing to both authorize and conduct investigations that they knew to be invalid. This has to be a conspiracy that runs from low-level agents conducting the investigation to McCabe and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein.
It’s very likely that the memo will indicate that McCabe and Rosenstein signed off on the request or, at the very least, let it go past when they should have stopped it.
Earlier Republican contentions that matched the remainder of Page’s checklist—including the idea that the FBI helped pay Steele—appear to have been pre-bunked. But don’t be surprised if they’re raised again as if they’re real.
And don’t expect the Republicans to release the information to back up these claims.