The House committee, chaired by Nunes, made an agreement with the Justice Department that only one person would be able to review the underlying documents which were the basis for the memo. This person was Gowdy.
Only one person was allowed, and that person just happened to be a Republican. The Democrats weren’t even allowed to see the surveillance documents! And the Republicans voted against the release of any memo the Democrats wrote, anyway!
Then Nunes wrote his memo based on what Gowdy relayed to him.
So, basically, Nunes wrote a memo based on information given to him by Gowdy. Gowdy himself says that the memo doesn’t say what Nunes says it does. Nunes wouldn’t let anyone else see the underlying documents, and the Republicans won’t let the Democrats release a counter memo. The Republicans stacked the deck, and *still *managed to draw a losing hand.
As I understand it, his recusal ended after the House Ethics Committee cleared him of releasing classified information last spring.
However, the larger point of how Nunes’ oversight role is impossibly conflicted, given his role on the Trump transition team, doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
I’m starting to think that congressional rules should be changed so that the Chairman and Rabking Member of certain committees should be required not to undertake certain pilicitica activities as a condition of their leadership positions. For example, the intelligence committees shouldn’t have a close relationship with the White House. It might be wise to prevent members of the ethics committees from raising funds for congressional candidates that they might have to investigate.
The more I think about it, those are probably smart rules.
There’s a marvelous bit of equivocation, both in this quote and in the memo.
Yes, as near as I can tell, Steele was considered an “unreliable informant.” That makes it sound as though the information he brings is unreliable.
Thing is, he was a reliable informant for a really long time. What made him an unreliable informant was that he revealed his status as an informant. He could not be relied on to keep secret.
“Unreliable,” in this context, has nothing to do with the quality of his information. Folks are equivocating, though, taking the correct description of “unreliable (to stay secret) informant” and turning around and treating it like it means “unreliable (to give good information) informant.”
That’s a crappy thing to do, a real “bear false witness against thy neighbor” thing to do, but full props, it’s pretty clever.
I don’t find this argument to be terribly compelling, because it rests on the assumption that the powers asserted by the investigative and intelligence agencies are indeed “necessary and already at the bare minimum for their organizations to basically function”. Basically, it’s an assertion that the American people and the government institutional accountable to them need to sit down, shut up, and let the agencies act on their own unconstrained judgment. That is obviously an untenable position, especially given the agencies’ occasional history of doing bad things and pushing bad ideas.
The argument I’ve seen elsewhere, and which I find to be much more plausible, is that by taking information provided to Congress by these agencies as part of the oversight process and perverting it to political ends, Pumpkinhead and his minions have inflicted serious damage on the oversight process by creating the impression among agency personnel that their best option is to “go rogue” and hide what they’re up to from their own government in order to protect their legitimate secrets.
So, I guess this means that Flynn and Papadopoulos’ confessions and guilty pleas are now vacated? Poof, gone, never happened? Manafort and Gates, they walk?
Man, the power of the derp state! Shit, they organized three to five million illegal voters, and got clean away with it! Left not a shred of evidence of their skulduggery! Not even Himself could uncover it! And then went in and falsified all those records to make it seem as though shady money was finding its way into His pocket! Genius, I tells ya, genius!
lol, that’s not equivocation. Intelligence agencies around the world assess agents / informants based on those two factors: 1) Is the information provided by the informant truthful, more or less? And, 2) Is the informant himself or herself trustworthy and reliable - i.e., is he abiding by the terms of the agent/informant agreement? Is he a double agent? Does he take direction? Does his personal life detract from the mission (e.g., alcoholic, drug user, sexual deviant or profligate, mental illness, adulterous, etc.)? Those and other factors are considered when assessing a source for reliability. A source’s reliability unavoidably has an impact on the assessment of the truthfulness of the information he provides. You could have great access to secondary sources, you could have provided great information in the past (track record is important), but if you learn the source is sleeping with the wife of a primary target and didn’t disclose that fact to you, that would both be considered a factor in assessing his reliability (failure to disclose) and the truthfulness of the information he provides - if he wants to get the husband out of the picture, it could affect the truthfulness of the information he is providing. It’s kind of a given that informants lie, but if an informant were to consistently lie to me, or to consistently break the rules of our existing agreement, even if the information provided to date was corroborated by other means and sources and seemed to be accurate, I would close the source down - unless the access he provided couldn’t be replaced.
In Steele’s case, he was using (by his own identification) former Russian intelligence officers. He would not be the sole source with access to them (our own CIA does a pretty good job of recruitment in that area), and the likelihood that he was being played, based on what we know of how “former” intelligence officers continue ties with their former employers (here and there) means that the information he provided was, most likely, vetted and approved by the FSB. Given the circumstances of providing the same information to the media and (possibly) failing to disclose it, I would have shut him down as a source as well.
There you go again. “Unreliable” doesn’t mean “untrustworthy.” But you put them side by side so that you can equivocate again, claiming that being unwilling to follow FBI protocols around revealing your work has any reflection whatsoever on the quality of the source’s information.
It doesn’t. Nothing the FBI has said on the subject indicates otherwise.
Edit:
I assume you realize that none of this has anything to do with the disclosed reasons for terming him unreliable, right? I mean, at least it’s more relevant than that bizarre hypothetical about wanting to get rid of the husband of the woman you’re sleeping with (wtf?), inasmuch as I can stipulate it actually occurred–but the memo describes why he was termed “unreliable,” and the sources he used have nothing to do with it.
Did you actually read the Steele dossier? Only a few of his sources were former intelligence officers, and the info he got from them was generally corroborated by others who had never been intel officers.
But wait, that was all just a subterfuge, right? They were all former intel officers, the American intel services just didn’t know it.
You’re moving further and further out into the justification fringes.
The question was raised whether personal unreliability as a source reflects on the accuracy of the information supplied by the source. I’m noting it as a contributing factor. I’m familiar with the circumstances of the example I used, to point out that motivating factors (such as, in the case we are discussing, Steele telling Ohr how much he wanted to make sure Trump didn’t become President) can and should play a role in assessing the truthfulness of information. Did the informant have a motivation to lie, or simply to shade the information. Based on the reports, Steele clearly did; that doesn’t mean he DID lie, of course - usually there’s some animus against the target of the investigation or a source wouldn’t be reporting on it. But it should be considered as a factor - not simply on whether he told the truth, but if he took due diligence to vet his sub-sources.
In Steele’s case, which I have no personal knowledge of except for media reporting, he identified his subsources in his written reports as former FSB intel officers (or more precisely, “a senior Russian foreign ministry official,” “a former top-level intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin,”. I have no idea if he was willing to identify them to his FBI handler (if he didn’t, he shouldn’t have been paid); as those subsources almost certainly would have been targeted by other IOs in Moscow, it would be the expected thing to request other agencies operating in Russia (U.S. and friendly foreign) to check their sources and see if they have provided any reporting from these same sources. If the future president of the United States is paying prostitutes to piddle on the bed Obama slept in, for some strange reason, or any other form of blackmail was developed, **it’s very doubtful other sources in Moscow did not report on this. ** That would be a balls-out highest collection priority - the potential blackmail of a U.S. presidential candidate.
If that information was reported to any of the other agencies operating in Moscow, it should have been included as corroborating information in the FISA application. And maybe it was, I haven’t read it. But one would think that would have been leaked, to buttress the claims made in the FISA application.
If there was no secondary agency corroboration…why not? Is Steele such a master intelligence operative that ex-FSB officers and Russian hookers (who, I would guess, know that spilling the beans on an FSB-operated, high priority intelligence operation would be the quickest way to get a bullet in the head, but I digress) only feel comfortable confiding in him? Or, another possibility, he got played as part of a disinformation attempt by Putin and the FSB to screw with the American political system - as the former Moscow Chief of Station for the CIA has said. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-steele-dossier-fits-the-kremlin-playbook-1517175564 and Cover Lifted, A CIA Spy Offers His Take On Trump And Russia : NPR
is so much misleading equivocation. “Reliable” as a term of art is unrelated to the “unreliability” you’re talking about there. Reread the memo and the specific reasons why he was listed as less than reliable.
Let’s just take a look at the sources listed in the dossier, in the order that they are mentioned:
A - a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure
B - a former top level Russian intelligence officer
C - a senior Russian finance official
D - a close associate of Trump who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow
E- (redacted)
F - a female staffer at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton when Trump had stayed there
G - a senior Kremlin official
? - an emigre associate of Trump close to Trump campaign (probably the ethnic Russian associate of Trump mentioned later)
? - two well-placed and established Kremlin sources
? - a Kremlin official involved in US relations
? - a Kremlin insider
? - a senior member of the Russian Presidential Administration
? - a senior Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs official (Source A?)
? - a top level Russian government official
? - Two knowledgeable St. Petersburg sources, one a local business/political elite figure and the other a local services and tourist industry source
? - a senior Russian leadership figure
? - a Foreign Ministry official
? - a “trusted compatriot” of the preceding two sources
? - a close associate of Igor Sechin
? - a Kremlin insider
? - (redacted)
After the first memo, Steele stopped assigning letters to sources and simply explained their positions. There is also clearly some redundancy in the mentions but, again, they were in different memos and probably used this way for accuracy without having to refer back to a previous memo. Let’s call it roughly 12-15 individual sources. Exactly one of them is described as a current or former intel officer. That doesn’t proscribe the possibility that others were or are now, but claiming that all or even most of them are is stretching it by more than a little bit.
Once again you are assuming information that isn’t in the dossier.
You have no evidence that there was not secondary corroboration. As a matter of fact, reports in places outside of the Nunes memo state specifically that there were other sources of corroboration for some of the info. The FBI has verified parts of the dossier; which parts and how much apparently only known to them, the FISA judge, Mueller, and presumably some US intel agencies.
Right. First, prove that the Kremlin knew that Steele was collecting intel at that time and who his sources were, and then used those sources to feed him false info. You can’t? What a surprise. Theorycraft isn’t facts.
The big thing, AFAICT, is that we don’t know shit, which is how the FBI is supposed to function in cases like this.
I mean, Steel may have given unreliable information. Or he may not have. With the dribs of data we have, we don’t know.
The narrative that Nunes is pushing here is that, because Steel revealed his work for the FBI, he was a less-than-reliable [covert] informant; and that because they called him less than reliable, they shouldn’t have relied on his information.
It’s a bullshit narrative, for the reasons above. Those in a position to evaluate the actual information–which, again, is none of us–might decide the information was reliable or not. But it’s absurd for us to try to make that evaluation, especially to do so in opposition to the evaluation made by people at the FBI who reviewed it.
And again, those people never said the information was less than reliable. On the contrary, they used it to gain a warrant. I know I’m repeating this point, but the equivocation between “less than reliable informant” and “unreliable information” continues, so apparently this point needs repetition as well :).