Christopher Steele, the Man Behind the Trump Dossier

Republicans have gone to great lengths to attack and slander Christopher Steele, the former MI-6 agent for British Intelligence, who prepared a rough dossier that would indicate that Republicans at all levels have supported and continue to support a possible - in my view, most likely - traitor to the United States very susceptible to blackmail by Putin's Russia.  Devin Nunes and his fictional memorandum is perhaps the most egregious example of Republican efforts to resort to any means to protect the foul leader of their party, but Senators Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley have shown their debasement as well through their referral of  Steele’s name to the Department of Justice, for a possible criminal investigation.  Grassley's motives are less clear, but Graham is viewed by many as having his own secrets that make him susceptible to blackmail by Trump or others - it's not without reason that I refer to Graham as the Palmetto Queen.  A very long must read piece in the New Yorker looks at Steele and his history and credentials and underscores that Steele is reputable and long considered totally reliable by U.S. intelligence agencies and strongly suggests to me, Trump's Republican defenders and sycophants are not motivated by what is in the best interests of America.  With the Stormy Daniels scandal growing, there is ever more reason to believe that the more salacious portions of Steele's dossier might well be true.  As Senator Diane Feinstein has noted, nothing in the dossier todate has been refuted as false.  Here are article excerpts (there is much more that deserves a full read):  

A friend in Washington, D.C., was calling with bad news: two Republican senators, Lindsey Graham and Charles Grassley, had just referred Steele’s name to the Department of Justice, for a possible criminal investigation. They were accusing Steele—the author of a secret dossier that helped trigger the current federal investigation into President Donald Trump’s possible ties to Russia—of having lied to the very F.B.I. officers he’d alerted about his findings. The details of the criminal referral were classified, so Steele could not know the nature of the allegations, let alone rebut them, but they had something to do with his having misled the Bureau about contacts that he’d had with the press. For nearly thirty years, Steele had worked as a close ally of the United States, and he couldn’t imagine why anyone would believe that he had been deceptive. But lying to an F.B.I. officer is a felony, an offense that can be punished by up to five years in prison. The dossier painted a damning picture of collusion between Trump and Russia, suggesting that his campaign had “accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.” It also alleged that Russian officials had been “cultivating” Trump as an asset for five years, and had obtained leverage over him, in part by recording videos of him while he engaged in compromising sexual acts, including consorting with Moscow prostitutes who, at his request, urinated on a bed. Steele had spent more than twenty years in M.I.6, most of it focussing on Russia. For three years, in the nineties, he spied in Moscow under diplomatic cover. Between 2006 and 2009, he ran the service’s Russia desk, at its headquarters, in London. He was fluent in Russian, and widely considered to be an expert on the country. He’d also advised on nation-building in Iraq. As a British citizen, however, he was not especially knowledgeable about American politics. Peter Fritsch, a co-founder at Fusion who has worked closely with Steele, said of him, “He’s a career public-service officer, and in England civil servants haven’t been drawn into politics in quite the same way they have here. He’s a little naïve about the public square.” A longtime friend of Steele’s pointed out to me that Steele was in a singularly unenviable predicament. The dossier had infuriated both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump by divulging allegedly corrupt dealings between them. “You’ve got oligarchs running both superpowers,” the friend said. “And, incredibly, they both hate this same guy.” . . . . Legal experts soon assured Steele that the criminal referral was merely a political stunt. Nevertheless, it marked a tense new phase in the investigation into Trump’s alleged ties to Russia. It was not the first time that a congressional investigation had been used as a tool for destroying someone’s reputation. Whenever a scandal hit Washington, opponents used subpoenas, classified evidence, and theatrical public hearings to spread innuendo, confusion, and lies. Senators Grassley and Graham declined to be interviewed for this article . . .
 Democratic members of the committee, who had not been consulted by Republicans about the criminal referral against Steele, were enraged. The California senator Dianne Feinstein, the ranking minority member on the committee, declared that the Republicans’ goals were “undermining the F.B.I. and Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation” and “deflecting attention” from it. Feinstein said that the criminal referral provided no evidence that Steele had lied, and, she added, “not a single revelation in the Steele dossier has been refuted.”

Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island, is a former prosecutor who also serves on the Judiciary Committee. “To impeach Steele’s dossier is to impeach Mueller’s investigation,” he told me. “It’s to recast the focus back on Hillary.” The Republicans’ aim, he believed, was to “create a false narrative saying this is all a political witch hunt.”

Steele’s lawyers have advised him not to speak publicly about the controversy, and, because he is a former intelligence officer, much of his life must remain secret. His accusers know this, and, as Senator Whitehouse explained, “they are using selective declassification as a tactic—they use declassified information to tell their side, and then the rebuttal is classified.” Both the criminal referral and Nunes’s report used secret evidence to malign Steele while providing no means for his defenders to respond without breaching national-security secrets. But interviews with Steele’s friends, colleagues, and business associates tell a very different story about how a British citizen became enmeshed in one of America’s most consequential political battles. Steele worked out of the British Embassy for M.I.6, under diplomatic cover. His years in Moscow, 1990 to 1993, were among the most dramatic in Russian history, a period that included the collapse of the Communist Party; nationalist uprisings in Ukraine, the Caucasus, and the Baltic states; and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin gained ultimate power in Russia, and a moment of democratic promise faded as the K.G.B.—now called the F.S.B.—reasserted its influence, oligarchs snapped up state assets, and nationalist political forces began to emerge. Vladimir Putin, a K.G.B. operative returning from East Germany, reinvented himself in the shadowy world of St. Petersburg politics. Steele’s already dim view of the Kremlin darkened in November, 2006, when Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian K.G.B. officer and a Putin critic who had been recruited by M.I.6, suffered an agonizing death in a London hospital, after drinking a cup of tea poisoned with radioactive polonium-210. Moscow had evidently sanctioned a brazen murder in his own country. Steele was put in charge of M.I.6’s investigation. Authorities initially planned to indict one suspect in the murder, but Steele’s investigative work persuaded them to indict a second suspect as well. Nine years later, the U.K.’s official inquiry report was finally released, and it confirmed Steele’s view: the murder was an operation by the F.S.B., and it was “probably approved” by Vladimir Putin. The British Secret Intelligence Service is highly regarded by the United States, particularly for its ability to harvest information from face-to-face sources, rather than from signals intelligence, such as electronic surveillance, as the U.S. often does. British and American intelligence services work closely together, and, while Steele was at M.I.6, British intelligence was often included in the U.S. President’s daily-briefing reports. In 2008, Michael Hayden, the C.I.A. director, visited the U.K., and Steele briefed him on Russian developments. The following year, President Obama visited the U.K., and was briefed on a report that Steele had written about Russia. Steve Hall, a former chief of the C.I.A.’s Central Eurasia Division, which includes Russia, the former Soviet states, and the Balkans, told me, “M.I.6 is second only perhaps to the U.S. in its ability to collect intelligence from Russia.” He added, “We’ve always coördinated closely with them because they did such a great job. Steele has not been to Russia, or visited any former Soviet states, since 2009. Unlike some of his former M.I.6 colleagues, he has not been declared persona non grata by Putin’s regime, but, in 2012, an Orbis informant quoted an F.S.B. agent describing him as “an enemy of Mother Russia.” Steele concluded that it would be difficult for him to work in the country unnoticed. The firm guards the identities of its sources, but it’s clear that many Russian contacts can be interviewed elsewhere, and London is the center of the post-Soviet Russian diaspora.

Orbis often performs anti-corruption investigations for clients attempting internal reviews, and helps hedge funds and other financial companies perform due diligence or obtain strategic information. One Orbis client who agreed to talk to me, a Western businessman with interests in Russia and Ukraine, described Steele to me as “very efficient, very professional, and very credible.” He said that his company had successfully cross-checked Steele’s research with other people, adding, “I don’t know anyone who’s been critical of his work. His reports are very good. It’s an absolute no-brainer that he’s just a political target. They’re trying to shoot the messenger.”

Two of his earliest cases at Orbis involved investigating international crime rings whose leaders, coincidentally, were based in New York’s Trump Tower.

Steele’s first client after leaving M.I.6 was England’s Football Association, which hoped to host the World Cup in 2018, but suspected dirty dealings by the governing body, fifa. England lost out in its bid to Russia, and Steele determined that the Kremlin had rigged the process with bribes. According to Ken Bensinger’s “Red Card,” an upcoming book about the scandal, “one of Steele’s best sources” informed him that the Deputy Prime Minister, Igor Sechin—now the C.E.O. of the Russian state-controlled oil giant Rosneft—is suspected of having travelled to Qatar “to swap World Cup votes.”

In 2011, Steele contacted an American agent he’d met who headed the Bureau’s division for serious crimes in Eurasia. Steele introduced him to his sources, who proved essential to the ensuing investigation. In 2015, the Justice Department indicted fourteen people in connection with a hundred and fifty million dollars in bribes and kickbacks. One of them was Chuck Blazer, a top fifa official who had embezzled a fortune from the organization and became an informant for the F.B.I. Blazer had an eighteen-thousand-dollar-per-month apartment in Trump Tower, a few floors down from Trump’s residence. Several years ago, the F.B.I. hired Steele to help crack an international gambling and money-laundering ring purportedly run by a suspected Russian organized-crime figure named Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. The syndicate was based in an apartment in Trump Tower. Eventually, federal officials indicted more than thirty co-conspirators for financial crimes. . . . . “It was as if all criminal roads led to Trump Tower,” Steele told friends. [O]n several occasions Orbis had warned authorities about major security threats. Three years ago, a trusted Middle Eastern source told Orbis that a group of isis militants were using the flow of refugees from Syria to infiltrate Europe. Orbis shared the information with associates who relayed the intelligence to German security officials. Several months later, when a concert hall in Paris, the Bataclan, was attacked by terrorists, Burrows and Steele felt remorse at not having notified French authorities as well. When Steele took his suspicions about Trump to the F.B.I. in the summer of 2016, it was in keeping with Orbis protocol, rather than a politically driven aberration. [In April, 2016, Steele] finished a secret investigation, which he called Project Charlemagne, for a private client. It involved a survey of Russian interference in the politics of four members of the European Union—France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Germany—along with Turkey, a candidate for membership. The report chronicles persistent, aggressive political interference by the Kremlin: social-media warfare aimed at inflaming fear and prejudice, and “opaque financial support” given to favored politicians in the form of bank loans, gifts, and other kinds of support. The report discusses the Kremlin’s entanglement with the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the French right-wing leader Marine Le Pen. (Le Pen and Berlusconi deny having had such ties.) It also suggests that Russian aid was likely given to lesser-known right-wing nationalists in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. The Kremlin’s long-term aim, the report concludes, was to boost extremist groups and politicians at the expense of Europe’s liberal democracies. The more immediate goal was to “destroy” the E.U., . . . . Mark Medish, a former director of Russian affairs at the National Security Council, told me that “if Steele had not shared his findings, he might have been accused of dereliction or a coverup.” He added, “It takes courage to deliver bad news, particularly when the stakes are so high.” And Senator Whitehouse described Steele’s actions as akin to warning the F.B.I. about a “physical detonation of some sort,” noting, “If it had gone off, and he or the F.B.I. had ignored it, heads would roll.”

Regardless of what others might think, it’s clear that Steele believed that his dossier was filled with important intelligence. Otherwise, he would never have subjected it, his firm, and his reputation to the harsh scrutiny of the F.B.I. “I’m impressed that he was willing to share it with the F.B.I.,” Sipher said. “That gives him real credibility to me, the notion that he’d give it to the best intelligence professionals in the world.”

A number of former intelligence officers, however, believe that the [Trump Tower] meeting, which happened soon after Papadopoulos’s encounter with the Australian diplomat, enhances the dossier’s credibility. John McLaughlin, the deputy director of the C.I.A. from 2000 until 2004, told me, “I haven’t formed a final thought, but clearly parts of it are starting to resonate with what we know to be true about the Russians’ willingness to deliver information harmful to Hillary Clinton.”

Read the rest of the piece which lays out an timeline on Trump/Russia interfacing.  My conclusion?  We have a likely traitor in the White House.  Anyone who believes otherwise either has their head in the sand or is becoming complicit in harming the nation. 

The Stormy Daniels Scandal Gets Serious

Alleged Trump mistress Stormy Daniels.

Ironically, most of Donald Trump's problems are self-made and the growing scandal swirling around porn star Stormy Daniels' affair with Trump is a perfect example.  Like so many other of the Trump/Pence regime scandals, this scandal - which would upset evangelical Christians if they actually stood for what they claim - stems directly from Trump's belief that he can do whatever he wants.  A wife and small infant at home, who cares.  Ditto for possible conspiracies with Russia.  Ditto for the stream of daily lies.  The law and common morality simply mean nothing to the man.  Now, the Stormy Daniels scandal seems to be gaining steam and more and more questions grow about possible illegalities that may surround the $130,000 in hush money paid to Danils under a bizarre agreement that seemingly did not use either Daniels' or Trump's names.  A column in the New York Times looks at the mounting scandal which, if Republicans were consistent with the feigned outrage over the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, ought to be resulting in outrage.  Here are column highlights:

In January we learned, thanks to The Wall Street Journal, that Michael Cohen, a lawyer for Donald Trump, arranged a $130,000 hush money payment to the pornographic film star known as Stormy Daniels in the closing days of the 2016 presidential campaign. The payment was to stop Daniels from speaking out about an alleged affair she’d had with Trump shortly after Melania Trump, his third wife, gave birth to their son, Barron.

With any previous president the story would have been explosive, but with this one, it felt relatively minor. The real scandal, it seemed, was that there was no scandal, because no one expects any better of Trump. The religious right was willing to give him a “mulligan,” in the words of Tony Perkins, president of the [hate group] Family Research Council. Liberals rolled their eyes at right-wing hypocrisy, but ranked the affair fairly low on the list of Trump outrages.

But Daniels — whose real name is Stephanie Clifford — is a clever capitalist who’s been determined to force the story of her relationship with Trump into the public eye. She has parlayed her new notoriety into a series of strip-club appearances, including two in South Florida on Friday and Saturday. More significantly, her lawyer has filed a lawsuit arguing that the nondisclosure agreement she signed is null and void because Trump himself never signed it. The suit, ingeniously, has given Daniels’s lawyer a pretext to make that agreement public.

[F]or all its sordid details, it isn’t really a sex scandal. It’s a campaign finance scandal, a transparency scandal and potentially part of an ongoing national security scandal. It’s salacious and absurd, but we should take it seriously. Trump’s team certainly seems to; Cohen recently obtained a temporary restraining order to silence Daniels.

Let’s start with the campaign finance piece. On Jan. 22, the nonpartisan government watchdog group Common Cause filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission and the Department of Justice claiming that the $130,000 payment to Daniels constituted an in-kind contribution to Trump’s presidential campaign, in violation of federal campaign law.

[T]he release of the NDA makes clear that Trump himself was a party to the agreement. If Trump authorized the $130,000 payment, it’s harder to explain away his campaign’s failure to disclose it, as required by law.                               He calls it the “Al Capone problem.” The Daniels NDA refers repeatedly to “property” that she agreed to turn over to Trump, including video images, still images, emails and text messages. Eisen argues that Trump was required to report ownership of this property, as well as any obligations he might have had to reimburse Cohen for the $130,000, in his federal financial disclosure forms. . . . . “Imagine what she could get if she has texts or images. Imagine the millions she could command! So there’s this incredibly valuable agreement, and the L.L.C., Essential Consultants, which Trump now appears to be a beneficiary of. That’s an asset.” But it’s an asset Trump didn’t reveal.

Finally, the Daniels story is germane to the overriding scandal of the Trump administration, the one involving Trump’s relationship with Russia. Christopher Steele, the British ex-spy who compiled an infamous dossier of opposition research on Trump, wrote that Russia could blackmail Trump with evidence of his “sexual perversion.” Nothing we know of Daniels confirms the dossier’s outré claims about what such perversion entailed. The NDA does, however, show that Trump was susceptible to blackmail. 

Indeed, Daniels isn’t the only woman who was allegedly paid off after an encounter with Trump. . . . . Steve Bannon told “Fire and Fury” author Michael Wolff that another Trump lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, “took care” of “a hundred women” during the campaign.  “It all kind of fits together in a way,” Nick Akerman, a former Watergate prosecutor, said of the Daniels scandal and the Russia one. “It’s really blackmail over sex.”

Ultimately, the details of Trump’s relationship with Daniels will likely come out. . . . Should Daniels prevail in court, we might learn interesting information about the president. Among other things, the NDA forbids her from discussing Trump’s “alleged children” or “paternity information.” But the scandal will lie less in the details of Trump’s degeneracy than in the steps he and his lawyers took to cover it up. “This is early days yet in the unfolding of this scandal,” said Eisen. Like Trump himself, it’s preposterous, but it’s not going away.

I hope Daniels is successful in getting the story out.  I have no desire to see images of a naked Trump cavorting with Daniels - the very though is repulsive and vomit worthy - but I do want all of this rubbed in the faces of the evangelical Christians who threw away morality when they voted for Trump and Republicans only too willing to prostitute them self to Trump and the hideous GOP party base.  I suspect that the only person laughing about all of this is Vladimir Putin who likely has more sexual escapade bombshells in his possession.  As for Melania, I feel sorry for her, but she should have known what she was getting herself into given Trumps adulterous past. 

Democratic Memo Discredits Nunes, GOP

Lost somewhat in the noise surrounding CPAC, the battle against the NRA and the constant lies flowing from the Trump/Pence regime is the release of the Democrat memo that responded to Devin Nunes' fictional and disingenuous memorandum that sought to discredit the FBI and CIA to undermine the serious issues surrounding the investigation into Trump campaign collaboration with Russian intelligence operatives to throw the 2016 presidential campaign to Trump and also undermine American democracy in general.  As expected, the Democrat memo debunks the fictions pressed in the Nunes memo, a memo many believe was drafted with input from the White House.  A column in the Washington Post looks at  the quiet release of an important document.  Here are highlights:

The House Intelligence Committee released on Saturday a redacted version of a Democrat-authored memo rebutting GOP allegations that federal law enforcement agencies used politically-biased information to conduct surveillance on one of the president’s former campaign aides.” The memo, as Democrats promised, does debunk and undermine many of the allegations made in the memo released by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).

[T]he memo from committee ranking member Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) states there was ample evidence to conduct surveillance of Carter Page entirely apart from the dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, including “contemporaneous evidence of Russia’s election interference; concerning Russian links and outreach to Trump campaign officials; Page’s history with Russian intelligence; and … Page’s suspicious activities in 2016, including in Moscow.”

 

Notice that the memo says the suspicious activities included not merely the trip itself but activities in Moscow. If the FBI had detailed knowledge of Page’s activities beyond his bizarre pro-Russia speech, that could provide insight into the interaction between the Trump campaign and the Russian campaign for then-candidate Donald Trump. Those activities reportedly include meeting with Igor Sechin, a close associate of Russian president Vladimir Putin, to discuss energy deals if sanctions were lifted and meeting with a senior Kremlin official who disclosed that the Russians had compromising information on Hillary Clinton and that such information might be released to the Trump campaign. 

 

In short, not only did the dossier play a minor role in obtaining the surveillance of Page, but Page’s own actions provide an extraordinary window into communications from and to the Russians about dirt on Clinton. Do we think Page kept all this to himself when he returned?

The memo confirms that the FBI investigation began on July 31, 2016, well before the receipt of the dossier, and that it was based not only on information about George Papadopoulos’s  efforts to reach out to Russians but also on information about “Russia’s aggressive covert operations to influence our elections, which the FBI was already monitoring.” Schiff goes on to explain that by the time it received the dossier there were “sub-inquiries” into multiple people linked to the campaign. (The exact number of these is redacted.)

While the memo is heavily redacted, it does state that the Justice Department provided additional information in FISA renewals obtained through multiple independent sources that corroborated Steele’s reporting. What is intriguing here is that nearly the entire section supporting that conclusion is blacked out. What parts were confirmed? How were they confirmed? We still don’t know, but the prospect of ample corroboration of the dossier’s allegations (salacious or not) should be extremely troubling to the Trump team.

The memo also states that “Russian agents previewed their hack and dissemination of stolen emails.” Was this a heads-up to Roger Stone? If they were previewing the email release to anyone associated with the Trump campaign, that surely constitutes collusion by anyone’s definition.

In sum, the memo seems to undercut the gravamen of Nunes’s conspiracy theory, namely that the entire investigation was premised on a partisan dossier financed by the Clinton campaign. Even more important, it also hints at a wealth of information not yet revealed that may substantiate ties between the Russians and the Trump campaign. The more of these ties, the more people involved and the more detailed these interactions were, the more likely, of course, is that someone, at some point told Trump or his inner circle about them. If Schiff intended to whet our appetite for more details and confirm the extent of the Trump campaign-Russia ties, he succeeded.

There’s a Good Chance Trump Is Being Blackmailed

In the wake of the Stormy Daniels sex scandal swirling around serial adulterer and self-proclaimed sexual predator Donald Trump, a new story of illicit sex and payoffs has come out, this time involving a former Playboy playmate.  As in the Daniels sexcapade, this latest affair to be revealed,   took place while Trump's youngest child was an infant and steps were taken to payoff Trump's sex partner to guarantee her silence.  All of which makes some wonder: were the sex stories in the Steele dossier true and, if so, is Trump being blackmailed by Vladimir Putin?   One can just imagine Putin reminding Trump of what a sensation the alleged "golden shower" video would be.   A second question, at least in my mind, is when are evangelical Christians going to disavow Trump.   A piece in New York Magazine looks at the question of Trump being blackmailed.  Here are excerpts:

We have no idea if the wildest and most memorable allegation Christopher Steele picked up in his investigation of Donald Trump — that the future president is vulnerable to Russian blackmail related to his paying Russian prostitutes in 2013 — is true. There are two common grounds for skepticism. One is that Trump, who is known both for his affairs and for grabbing women, would pay for sex. The second is that a man so happily associated with infidelity and vice could be blackmailed at all. We now know neither of these objections holds water.

Ronan Farrow’s new story shows that Trump habitually pays for sex. He had an affair with former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal, and offered her money after sex, which she turned down. At another point in the story, he offered adult entertainer Jessica Drake $10,000 for “her company.”

Farrow’s reporting also implies, without quite establishing as an absolute certainty, that Trump maintained a system for silencing his sexual partners. A network of sleazy operators, sometimes working in conjunction with National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, Trump’s close friend, would pay off women to prevent their stories from seeing the light of day. 

So, we know Trump habitually pays for sex, and we also know he is willing to pay to keep embarrassing secrets from going public. That is to say, these secrets could be leveraged against him. One of Pecker’s former employees tells Farrow, “In theory, you would think that Trump has all the power in that relationship, but in fact Pecker has the power — he has the power to run these stories. He knows where the bodies are buried.” What else do we know? We know Russia has a decades-old system for gathering compromising sexual secrets on prominent foreign visitors. We also know Trump harbored a burning resentment of President Obama in the wake of Obama’s mocking him at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner. And many reports of Trump’s decision-making suggest that the strongest consideration in any decision is the chance to defile or destroy something associated with Obama.

Far from being bizarre, imagining Trump paying prostitutes to pee on a bed Obama used as a primitive revenge ritual, and Russians taping the episode, is perfectly consistent with what we know about both parties.  That exact scenario may not have happened. Indeed, sex is not the only kind of secret Trump harbors.

Some of that information is in the hands of his business partners, many of whom are associated with Russia or are unsavory in some other way. All in all, the odds are disconcertingly high that Russia, or somebody, has blackmail leverage over the president of the United States.

Disgusting and frightening as well.  And remember, evangelical Christians who want to dictate what others do in their bedrooms, support this foul and disgusting individual.  They have ZERO moral authority.  Absolutely ZERO! 

Nunes Memo Proves to Be a Dud to All But Kool-Aid Drinkers

Every review of the Nunes Memo I have heard on legitimate news outlets - which excludes Fox News that some are now calling "Trump TV" - seem to see the over wrought work of fiction as being a dud and/or not proving a shred of what Der Trumpenführer claims.  The principal bitch of Trump's stooges is that the FBI may have presented to the FISA court the Steele dossier as part of the supporting evidence.  It utterly ignores the fact that (i) Carter Page had been under intelligence agency scrutiny for roughly three (3) years BEFORE this filing particular FISA filing which was prompted by Page's travels to Russia, thus making Nunes' attempts to equate Page's trips to that of some midwest tourist are ridiculous, (ii) none of the "salacious" parts of the dossier related to Page - as one GOP congressman was forced to admit during an interview on Steele & Ungar last evening - and (iii) FISA court judges, not the FBI or Justice Department have the final say in whether a warrant is issued.  If the process is so flawed, why did not Nunes and others in Congress make changes before the reauthorization of the controlling law not that long ago?  Anyone other than the Kool-Aid drinkers of Trumps base ought to have severe questions for the Republicans behind the memo.  Indeed, a main Washington Post editorial underscores that the Nunes memo proves the very opposite of the lair-in-chief in the White House claims.  Here are editorial highlights:

EVEN TAKEN at face value, the infamous Nunes memo does nothing to discredit the Russia investigation, which was President Trump’s transparent aim in authorizing its release on Friday. It also does little to show abuse of surveillance law, which was the pretext on which House leaders justified its disclosure.

The memo argues that the FBI may have abused special spying authority under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), obtaining a warrant to surveil former Trump adviser Carter Page using information from the controversial Steele dossier, a collection of allegations about Mr. Trump and his circle assembled by a former British intelligence agent with funding from Democrats. The memo claims that the FBI did not disclose the dossier’s full provenance in its application for a FISA warrant, suggesting that the warrant against Mr. Page — and, therefore, perhaps, the early stages of the Russia investigation — was tainted.

Law enforcement officials have warned that the memo offers a slanted and inaccurate picture. Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), the vice chairman on the Senate Intelligence Committee with high-level access and far more credibility than those behind the memo, insisted Friday that the “underlying documents” on which the memo is based “simply do not support its conclusions.”

[T]he memo does more to refute than to support the FBI corruption narrative that the president is spinning. Consider these four damning admissions:

First, the memo states that separate information on a different Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos, “triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence operation.” In other words, it was not the Democratic-funded dossier or the warrant against Mr. Page that led to the Russia probe. Instead, the memo reveals that there were preexisting grounds to investigate, based on information about a different Trump associate. So the president cannot construe this memo as offering evidence that the Russia probe began corruptly.

Second, the memo indicates that the Justice Department sought its warrant against Mr. Page in October 2016 — after Mr. Page had left the Trump campaign. So the president’s campaign was not the intended target.

Third, the memo notes that “the FBI and DOJ obtained one initial FISA warrant targeting Carter Page and three FISA renewals,” and that “each renewal requires a separate finding of probable cause.” The court would not have made those separate findings or granted renewals without evidence that the surveillance was producing valuable information that Mr. Page may have been acting as an agent of a foreign power.

Fourth, the memo states that among those who signed renewal applications were Dana Boente, whom Mr. Trump tapped to temporarily lead the Justice Department after firing acting attorney general Sally Yates, and Rod J. Rosenstein, whom Mr. Trump chose to be the deputy attorney general. For the conspiracy narrative to hold any water, one would have to believe that officials appointed by a Republican president, including one confirmed by a Republican Senate, were part of a plot to bring down that same Republican president, and that they successfully hoodwinked FISA judges selected by the Republican-appointed chief justice of the United States. This hoodwinking would have continued after the nature of the dossier had been widely publicized and Mr. Page’s Russian connections publicly scrutinized. This is beyond improbable.

The memo offers no evidence that the dossier’s allegations about Mr. Page were wrong. In fact, Mr. Page himself confirmed a great deal of the dossier’s material about himself in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, admitting to extensive contact with Russian officials during a July 2016 trip to Moscow.

The memo also omits a great deal of the other information that bolstered the case against Mr. Page. He has been on the government’s radar screen since at least 2013, when investigators scrutinized a Russian spy’s apparent attempt to recruit him. 

Did the FISA court fail to receive all relevant information about the dossier? That’s a legitimate question, but it’s impossible to know the answer, especially because House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and other Republican leaders let the Nunes document go public without the simultaneous disclosure of a Democratic memo that is still restricted from public view. 

The Nunes memo has turned out to be a giant, damaging distraction. Shortly after its release, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) reminded the country of what is really at stake. “In 2016, the Russian government engaged in an elaborate plot to interfere in an American election and undermine our democracy,” Mr. McCain said. “ The latest attacks on the FBI and Department of Justice serve no American interests — no party’s, no president’s, only [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s. The American people deserve to know all of the facts surrounding Russia’s ongoing efforts to subvert our democracy, which is why Special Counsel [Robert S.] Mueller’s investigation must proceed unimpeded. . . . If we continue to undermine our own rule of law, we are doing Putin’s job for him.”

How long will Mr. Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and all the other supposed adults in the GOP watch in complicity as the president and his enablers do “Putin’s job for him”?