Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray, both of whom were appointed by Donald Trump, visited the White House on Tuesday in an effort to stop the release of the memo authored by Representative Devin Nunes. Both Wray and Rosenstein told Chief of Staff John Kelly that they opposed the release of the memo, which they warned was both inaccurate and a security risk.
In response, Kelly told Rosenstein and Wray that the president was still inclined to release the memo but the White House would go through a review led by the National Security Council and the White House Counsel’s Office, a senior administration official said. That review is expected to take at least several days, a senior White House official said.
That review was apparently sped up so that it took only a few minutes, or more likely the review is a perfunctory exercise intended to give the impression the White House is taking things seriously and building dramatic tension. Because following the State of the Union Speech Donald Trump told Republican Congressman Jeff Duncan that the decision was already made.
Duncan: Let’s release the memo.
Trump: Oh, yeah. Don’t worry. 100 percent.
The idea that Trump wouldn’t sell out the Justice Department and FBI for a moment of percieved political advantage actually seems a little … quaint.
In response to Department of Justice objections before the strictly partisan vote in the House to release the memo, Republicans claimed that FBI Director Wray had been sent a copy and hadn’t objected—a silence that they took to represent consent. But that’s clearly not Wray’s position. And clearly not Rosenstein’s position at the DOJ. Not that either objection will matter to Trump
But there’s still a chance that the memo will not be released—one that has nothing to do with either its inaccuracy or its threat to national security.
The biggest reason that Trump might choose to hold the memo is that it’s more valuable in the shadows than the light. Even Paul Ryan, whose role in this whole affair has been to cede control of Congress to Nunes, Mark Meadows, Matt Gaetz and the anything-for-Trump new core of the Republican Party, has expressed concern that when it gets to the public, the memo is going to prove a dud.
After all, the biggest shocker in the memo’s four pages of talking points seems to be that some information from a Christopher Steele memo may have been used in renewing the FISA warrant on Trump adviser Carter Page—an adviser whose importance Trump has gone to great lengths to minimize. That’s a hard sell as “bigger than Watergate” the “biggest political scandal in history” and a definitive cause that Robert Mueller’s investigation is “now dead.”
#ReleaseTheMemo may have been a thriller for Trump’s biggest social media fans—and a few thousand Russian bots—but the actual memo, though lopsided, distorted, and heavily edited to present things in the worst light possible, may still prove to be a snoozer if it comes to the public. Plus, every mention of the memo in mainstream media is likely to be accompanied by at least some mention of the fact that it’s lacking supporting documents, or that Republicans blocked a Democratic memo intended to provide perspective, or that author Devin Nunes didn’t even see the documents on which the memo was based.
For that reason, and that reason only, Trump may suddenly decide to believe the FBI and DOJ and keep the memo buried. Doing so would allow the memo fanatics to continue to talking about how awful, how powerful, and how damning the contents are … without having to face the twisted, weak, and rather pitiful truth. Plus we could see leak after leak that claimed to be some part of this mystery memo.
But odds are, Trump will simply release it. After all, Republicans have already built up a perfectly good conspiracy theory that apparently includes Rod Rosenstein and Andrew McCabe and Christopher Steele and James Comey and Hillary Clinton. There are hungry conspiracy fans out there to feed. It’s time to serve the pizza.