The Memo shows the FBI and DOJ lying to spy on an opposition presidential candidate and it undermines the entire rationale for the Mueller investigation.

The House Intel Memo (the “memo”) is out. It contains some bombshells:

One, several of the top people at the FBI and the DOJ, using both lies of omission and commission, falsified applications for FISA warrants to use on Carter Page, a member of Trump’s campaign team. As a general matter, falsifying a warrant does not lead to criminal liability for government officers, but the situation is rightly different when it comes to getting a warrant for NSA intercepts.  The NSA’s capabilities and intercept database are mind-bogglingly extensive and they sweep up uncountable conversations involving innocent Americans. If actors in our government, relying on the cloak of secrecy that covers FISA court actions, ever decided to misuse the NSA’s capabilities to target political enemies, they could turn our nation overnight from a democratic republic into something akin to a police state.  Congress therefore established criminal penalties for misusing NSA capabilities (50 U.S.C. § 1809) and created a special FISA Court to protect against such misuse.  The people responsible for signing those FISA warrants are James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates, Dana Boente and Rod Rosenstein.  That last name adds some complications, obviously.

Two, a person can infer from the memo that those warrants did not result in any useful information.  Otherwise Mueller & Co. would long since have brought charges would against Carter Page and / or the NSA warrants would be ongoing.

Three, the fact that the Steele Dossier, rather than independently developed or corroborated facts, was the basis for a finding of probable cause to get a FISA warrant calls throws into stark relief the question of whether Rod Rosenstein acted lawfully when he appointed Robert Mueller to conduct an intelligence, not a criminal investigation. On that same basis, if there’s no reason to believe that the FBI independently corroborated facts sufficient to make a probable cause finding about some anomalous Trump/Russian conclusion “crime,” then how can there possibly be an investigation into an obstruction of justice charge?

Four, before going into detail on the memo, John Hinderaker at Powerline raises an excellent point about what’s missing from the memo: [Read more…]