SOTU REAX: The State of the Union was this week (can you believe it was this week? Doesn’t it feel like it was a month ago?), and lord knows I could not and did not watch it. But I read some good discussion of it. My favorite take came from Charles Pierce; I encourage you to read it! Chait’s reaction: “Trump the president in many ways resembles Trump the candidate — or, for that matter, Trump the branding magnate. He sells himself, not anything concrete. His endless superlatives take the place of any real value he could offer. Everything he says he is doing for you lies far off in the future, after the time when he can still be held accountable for failing to deliver it.”
THE MEMO! THE STUPID FUCKING MEMO!: I can’t handle one more second of the massive, bottomless bad faith that produced The Goddamn Memo and perpetuates its send-me-to-the-fainting couch reaction. Here’s what the stupid fucking thing, which was released on Friday, actually says: It says that when the FBI got a warrant from the FISA court in October 2016 to surveil Carter Page, a former Trump advisors, it failed to tell the court that some of the information being used in its FISA application came from a source that was paid by Democrats, and thus could be politically motivated. That is the entire memo. I am not spinning this or obfuscating: That’s literally the entire sum of the allegations in the memo. This was the stuff that was supposed to be so outrageous, so criminal, as to put Watergate to shame.
There are many things that are bizarre about The Memo and Its Hype. First, and not least, the memo not just undercuts but disproves what had been the prevailing right-wing conspiracy theory: that the entire FBI investigation was based on the so-called “dossier” made by British spy Christopher Steele. (That was supposed to be a scandal because the dossier was paid for by Democrats, so that means it is ipso facto fake news or something.) Since the FBI investigation was premised on what the Right likes to call “the dodgy dossier,” then the entire thing is a hoax and Mueller should be promptly canned. But then the Memo, in its last paragraph, just flat-out states that “[t]he Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016,” confirming the New York Times’ reporting on this.
Second, of course, is the odd decision to base an entire conspiracy on the supposed injustice of surveilling Carter Page. This is a guy who was already on the FBI’s radar as of 2013 because of his cavorting with known Russian spies. This is a guy who bragged about being a close advisor to the Kremlin. A guy who’s entire face screams: “I’m guilty!” AND, what’s more, this is a guy who the White House has insisted played a next -to-nothing role in the campaign and was not even part of the campaign as of October 2016, when he was surveilled. So the GOP wants us to simultaneous believe that Carter Page was a nobody with no connection to the campaign and that the FBI, in surveilling him, was engaged in a conspiracy to take down Trump’s campaign and sabotage his chances of winning the White House.
Third, the memo revealed that the surveillance of Page was approved by FBI and DOJ officials and the FISA court four separate times -- including by Trump’s hand-picked deputy AG Rod Rosenstein. This is important not only because it undercuts the insination that rogue Obama-era officials were ginning up faux investigations into Trump’s people, but it also means that new evidence was presented to the court that the surveillance was bearing fruit:
When a FISA order is obtained to conduct surveillance on an American, the FBI must get a reauthorization from the FISA court every 90 days. In seeking renewal they cannot simply recycle the original application—they must demonstrate that the surveillance has been fruitful. In other words, they need to show the judge that the surveillance has developed foreign intelligence that reaffirms the original probable cause determination and shows that their suspicions had merit and the target is acting on behalf of a foreign power. If the FBI cannot show new evidence like this, the surveillance is likely to be terminated. In other words, the fact that the FISA order was renewed means that the original “poison” of the Steele memorandum did not taint the subsequent renewals—it means that there actually is a “there there”—at least in the eyes of the renewing judges.
Accordingly, according to former Whitewater investigator Paul Rosenzweig, it is “utterly implausible (if not borderline impossible) for the renewal that Rosenstein approved to be reliant on the Steele memorandum.”
Next up is the fact that nowhere does the Memo purport to claim that the Steel information provided the probable cause necessary to obtain the warrant. In fact, it seems likely that it was not the crucial, but-for cause of the warrant -- because if it were, the memo surely would have said so.
Finally -- and really, I can’t believe I’ve even taken us down this rabbit hole of stupid -- is the obvious fact that, if the FBI were trying to sabotage the Trump campaign they probably would have, you know, done that rather than single-handedly ensure that Trump won. Remember: Both the Clinton campaign and the Trump campaign were under FBI investigation, one for possibly being careless with her emails and the other for possibly colluding with a hostile foreign power to undermine American democracy. (Samsies.) During the campaign, only one of those investigations was known by the public. About only one of those campaigns were there frequent and misleading leaks from the FBI. And the FBI explicitly lied to the New York Times about its findings regarding the Trump campaign. I can’t believe I even have to remind us all of this, but there was ONE campaign that the FBI actively and overtly destroyed, and ONE campaign that it buoyed if by no other action than by staying silent.
In fact, the absurdity of this goddamn idiocy has become so obvious that even Republicans are running from Nunes’ overwhelming stupid. “Calling on Trump not to interfere in Mueller’s investigation, four Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee dismissed on Sunday the idea that the memo’s criticism of how the FBI handled certain surveillance applications undermines the special counsel’s work. Reps. Trey Gowdy (S.C.), Chris Stewart (Utah), Will Hurd (Tex.) and Brad Wenstrup (Ohio) represented the committee on the morning political talk shows.” If it’s too stupid for Trey Gowdy, you know you’ve really sunk to what should be but is likely nowhere near the bottom of the world’s reserve of idiocy.
So that’s the goddamn memo.
Endorsements:
- The entire reason I wanted to write a newsletter this week was so that I could endorse this truly spectacular video.
- Good news: Trump’s truly psychotic nominee to head the Council on Environmental Quality is out.
- This timeline of Trump’s obstruction efforts (not even including this Memo crap).
