Because all I’m hearing is the noise. Can someone lay out the basics of this for me?
So, Nunes has a memo. (Um, I’ve got a whole stack of memos on my desk.)
Start from the who what when where, please?
The noise is all about “IT’S EXPLOSIVE! IT’S GOING TO CHANGE THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE!”
Then there is the noise about “RELEASE THE MEMO!” But no, they are not going to release it, they’re only going to tell you that “IT’S EXPLOSIVE!” rinse and repeat. BUT MAYBE THEY ARE GOING TO RELEASE IT! But maybe not!
The story, in brief, is that Nunes and a bunch of Rpublicans on the House Intelligence Committee had a secret working group (which they didn’t invite Democrats to) to investigate whether the FBI tried to interfere in the 2016 election to get Hillary elected. The working group then wrote a memo that Nunes is saying is proof that the FBI and the Obama Justice Department did bad things for Hillary, but he won’t release the memo or give it to the Justice Department because the FBI and Justice Department is full of Deep State people who hate Trump and will try to bury it.
So Nunes et. al. wrote a memo, and then said “I have a memo!” So, why wouldn’t he just present the memo to the world? What’s the reasoning behind “I have a memo, but I’m not gonna show it to you”?
“I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” - Joseph McCarthy
We already know Clinton’s lawyers paid for the Russian intel dossier. Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your POV, money usually leaves a fairly distinct trail.
Supposedly, it contains a bunch of classified information in it.
(It is also, apparently, only four pages long and is almost certainly a worse version on the same subject that Inspector General Michael Horowitz has been investigating since January of last year. To the extent that there’s value in that investigation, it’s better to wait for the real version.)
It’s irrelevant. Sessions had to recuse himself from the Russia investigation because he was part of the Trump campaign. Devin Nunes should also be conflicted out of taking part of any investiation regarding Russia, as he was on the executive committee for the Trump transition team.
What we see is that Jeff Sessions is upholding higher ethical standards than Nunes and the entire Republican House Leadership, which is a shocking thing of anyone stopped to think about it for a second.
Daily Kos has a fairly concise breakdown of the basics. Liberal cooties abound, of course, but you already know that. One angle I hadn’t seen before or thought of is how this plays into Il Douche’s hopes to remove the top FBI and replace with more reasonable and compliant.
If the FBI was trying to get Hillary elected why did they do such a craptastically terrible job at it? Comey announcing in late October that Hillary was being investigated again was part of some master plan to get her elected? The whole theory makes no sense except to divert attention away from the Trump campaign shenanigans and to delegitimize the FBI.
Also the Russian dossier was originally paid for by Republicans, before the Dems coughed up for it, so it’s doubly irrelevant.
