Eric Zuesse
Immediately after the release on Friday February 2nd of the Republican Devin Nunes Memo that accuses the Democratic-Party-headed (Obama-run) FBI of having hidden from the FISA (national-security-state) court “essential” facts, the neoconservative Democratic Party organ The Atlantic headlined “The Surprise in the Nunes Memo: The controversial document raises some interesting questions—but also undermines the political argument it was intended to buttress.” Their David A. Graham opened his case for the Democratic Party:
The most important and interesting assertions, yet the ones that cry out for more clarification, concern an application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court to surveil former Trump foreign-policy adviser Carter Page. The memo states that a dossier prepared by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence official researching Trump on behalf of a firm hired by the Democratic National Committee, “formed an essential part of the Carter Page FISA application.” It also states that outgoing FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe told the committee that “no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.”
Each of these statements is important but heavily contingent. For one thing, the importance of the revelations hinges on the use of “essential.”
The article never again mentions McCabe, nor that he had “told the committee that ‘no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.’” Nor does it mention again the word “essential,” such as it would do if it were to actually challenge the appropriateness of that word as relating to “the importance of the revelations” (how important — “essential”).
So: when The Atlantic’s article questions “the importance of the revelations,” it provides no actual basis for doing so.
Furthermore, since the article doesn’t so much as mention even McCabe again, it offers no real challenge to the Memo’s allegation that “McCabe told the committee that ‘no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.’” It doesn’t again mention either McCabe or “essential,” nor any form of reference to either concept or individual.
Moreover, the Nunes Memo does include the assertion that, “McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.”
Consequently, unless Nunes is lying there, the Acting Director of the FBI, McCabe, did tell the Committee that “without the Steele dossier information,” “no surveillance warrant would have been sought [by the FBI] from the FISC.” This automatically would make “essential” to the entire matter, the fact (if it is a fact) that the Democratic Party operation hid from the FISC (the FISA court) relevant information regarding whether the Steele dossier constituted valid evidence for the court to consider.
Consequently, The Atlantic’s article is sheer Democratic Party propaganda.
Though I used to be a Democrat (and still am an FDR Democrat — and he was passionately anti-fascist), that Party is now just as fascist as is the Republican Party; and, based upon that article in The Atlantic, as a representative sample of the Democrats’ initial case against Devin Nunes’s Memo, there isn’t a case against it. Obama is probably guilty. As to whether Trump is, that would probably need to be the topic of a different Special Counsel, and a different case altogether than the one that’s now under way.
—————
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.