He omitted any mention of the footnote from his memo (a) because he apparently didn’t read the source material himself (as Ravenman points out), and (b) even if he had, it would have undercut the point of the memo: that the FBI didn’t tell the FISA court who was paying for the Steele dossier.
It was foolish of him to have a memo, to undertake this bullshit exercise. The potential publication of the memo as a propaganda tool with the goal of undermining the credibility of the Mueller investigation required the omission of the footnote, which opened Nunes up to having that pointed out, and exposing him as the fraud he is.
I refuse to consider the claim “Neither the initial application in October 2016, nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior and FBI officials” as “foolish.” I didn’t floss this morning. That was foolish. Claiming something you know or should have known was false is not “foolish.” It’s either a lie or willful ignorance.
This is apparently incorrect. (I wouldn’t call your claim “a lie or willful ignorance”, though it is something that “you know or should have known was false”.)
It would appear based on all reporting that the Nunes claim you quoted is technically accurate, though misleading.
I doubt that it’s too relevant on page 9 of this thread, but for the record, here are some more potential/likely outcomes of the Nunes release that may affect National Security:
The goal was to re-engergize the True Believers and The Cult Of Donald, and they obviously succeeded. Whether or not there will be any of them on any future jury and thus avoid a conviction remains to be seen.
If there is a silver lining to any of this nonsense, it would be if there’s an end to the idea in the minds of some Republican voters that law enforcement can’t be questioned. Of course, I don’t know that the suspicion will extend to, say, black men getting shot and it will likely cause huge problems… but allow me to clutch at straws here!
That’s an issue I hadn’t thought of. But that said, it’s hard to imagine that declassifying one application would cause such issues for all the others. The government has always had the discretion to declassify things.
I’d say about as permanent and meaningful as the sudden reverence Democratic voters have for the FBI.
I’m not aware of any such polls and I doubt if anyone polls about this type of question.
But as someone who regularly gets most of his information on such matters from liberal sources, I’m well aware of the traditional suspicion in such circles about the FBI in general and about secret surveillance applications in particular. So the present concern in these very circles that such suspicions are harming national security seems like a stark reversal.
Note: it’s not anything special or unique about Democrats. IMO everyone is in the same boat, and people’s principles and positions are much more malleable than they would like to think.
Seriously, you might consider the notion that many of us left-of-center types are capable of maintaining more complex understandings of people and institutions than ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ We’re aware that FBI agents, like law enforcement officers in general, tend to be pretty conservative. We’re also aware that the New York FBI office may have been so virulently anti-Hillary that they may have forced Jim Comey’s hand in reopening the Hillary emails investigation in October 2016. But on the whole, it’s largely composed of men and women trying their best to do a difficult but necessary job.
I think that sort of multifaceted understanding of the FBI more than adequately explains why people like me are supporting it now against attacks from the right, despite the problems we’ve had with the FBI in the past, and despite the near-certainty that when all this is past, we’ll have reason to criticize them for the sorts of excesses that law enforcement types tend towards.
Meanwhile, conservatives have gone from seeing the FBI as an organization that’s on their side to seeing it as corrupt, in the control of evil Democrats, and in need of a serious purging. Their understanding of the FBI is appallingly simplistic: when the FBI was doing things that helped their cause, the FBI was good. Now that it’s doing things that hurt their cause, the FBI is bad. Whether an institution in general is Good or Bad depends on whether it’s supporting or hindering Dear Leader. This is an authoritarian movement, nothing less.
