Take a Memo

The Nunes memo is now online, and it's borderline hilarious.  The memo is solely about if proper procedures were followed to get a FISA warrant against Carter Page!  But that's it.  In full.  Nothing about the Mueller investigation.  Zero.  Just about Carter Page -- Carter Page!! -- and the procedure used to get a FISA warrant for him.

Never mind, by the way, that the memo leaves out ALL the information sources provided to the FISA court to get the warrant (and that four separate judges signed off on the various warrants over times) and instead it solely addresses the use of the Steele Dossier as supposedly the main source for getting the warrant, when in reality it was just corroborating information. And in attempting damn the Dossier, the memo talking about how it was funded by Democrats, but in what must have been just a staff oversight leaves out that that the Dossier was, in fact, created by Republican funding.  Yet after all that, the memo actually concludes by saying that it was information from George Papadopoulos that "triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016" -- FIFTEEN MONTHS BEFORE the Steele Dossier was supposed used to get the FISA warrant in question.

More to the point -- the renew a FISA warrant, new information must be shown every 90 days that there have been advances in the investigation.  You can't just rely on the initial source material, whatever it is, however substantive.  And the FISA warrant for Carter Page was renewed three times.  

And nothing in the memo -- zero -- event hints that there was anything wrong in the information presented about Carter Page.  Merely suggestions that motives were impure.

And keep in mind, that all these thoughts here are just from me reading their own words.  I can only imagine how the memo will be gutted and filleted when the Democratic memo is released filled with corroborating information that the Nunes memo left out, and defends and supports the FISA warrants.

But further, after all this, it's important to know that Carter Page had actually LEFT the Trump campaign at the point of the FISA warrant (and he had been under investigation -- as being considered a Russian asset -- for THREE YEARS before then, long before he was a glimmer in the eye of the campaign), and the Trump campaign has done its best to insist that Carter Page had NO impact on it!

The thing is, what's important to remember is that the details in this memo (or left out of it) are almost unimportant.  What's most important about it in Trump World is to create distrust of the FBI and investigating entities, which is the most-dangerous thing about it.  On the other hand, I have no doubt that the Special Counsel's office is taking notes about it all, including reports of Trump telling associates that that was its point, adding more data to the Obstruction of Justice volume.
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But in the end, that's what the memo is. It's entirely about getting a FISA warrant for Carter Page.  It's about trying to protect someone who had been under investigation for three years for assisting the Russians.  It's about...Carter Page.  Period.