DOJ, FBI COME UNDER CRITICISM IN MEMO
everything to do with defending President Donald Trump from Mueller’s investigation.
As Mueller has accelerated his pace — indicting Trump’s former campaign manager and a deputy, interviewing White House aides and inducing two people connected to his campaign to plead guilty and cooperate — Trump’s allies in recent weeks have increasingly sought to shift the focus away from Russian election interference and instead portray the actions of investigators as the real scandal.
The memo is their latest salvo. Led by Nunes, the House Intelligence Committee is pivoting from examining Russia’s election meddling to instead investigating FBI and Justice Department officials connected to the inquiry, putting them — with Ryan’s clear blessing — at the forefront of the broader pushback.
Republicans are pushing the narrative that a cabal of politically biased law enforcement officials set out to sabotage Trump. And they are portraying a dossier written by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent, which laid out unverified claims that Russia had compromised Trump and was conspiring with him, as the fountainhead of the Russia investigation. That assertion disregards unrelated evidence that Russia sought to influence the election and the pattern of contacts between Russians and Trump’s associates.
Nunes’ 3 1/2-page memo bolsters conservatives’ storyline. According to people who have read it, the memo centers on a fall 2016 application for a wiretap order targeting Carter Page, a onetime Trump campaign official who had visited Moscow that June and was preparing to return there in December. The memo is said to criticize law enforcement officials for including information provided by Steele in the application without adequately explaining to the judge that Democrats financed Steele’s research.
Democrats have pushed back. Rep. Adam B. Schiff, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, who has seen the underlying classified materials on which the memo is based, has said the memo contained both inaccurate assertions and material omissions to misleadingly impugn law enforcement officials. Other people familiar with it say, for example, that Steele’s information was only one thread in a tapestry of evidence from various sources that the memo ignored, exaggerating its relative importance.
Democrats on the committee produced their own classified memo that they said pointed out and explained inaccuracies in the Republican memo and filled in the missing context. But on Monday, the committee voted along party lines to make the Republican memo public and rejected a request to simultaneously make public the Democrats’ rebuttal.
Asked why it would not be more appropriate to make both memos public at the same time, Ryan was evasive. He said the Democratic memo first had to go through a process in which House members outside the Intelligence Committee could read it. Pressed on why the Republican memo should not be held back until that process was done, he said a reporter had asked enough questions.
Ryan then began remarks he said he had prepared, stressing that he respected the FBI and the Justice Department as important institutions for “keeping the rule of law intact.” But on Monday, Intelligence Committee Republicans signaled a widening attack on both institutions — informing Democrats that the committee has opened an investigation into them, according to Schiff — as they voted to make their memo public.
Of particular importance, the Republican memo is said to cite the role of Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general appointed by Trump last year, in signing off on an application to extend the surveillance of Page — meaning he approved the resubmission of Steele’s information to the court. Rosenstein’s role could provide critics of the inquiry ammunition to go after him.
Under Justice Department regulations, only Rosenstein can fire Mueller, and only if he finds that the special counsel has committed misconduct — something he has repeatedly said he has not seen any sign of. But if Trump were to fire Rosenstein, he could install a more accommodating replacement willing to say that he or she had spotted a reason to justify removing the special counsel and shutting down the investigation.
While Ryan maintained there was no connection between the memo and Mueller’s work, the speaker also portrayed Nunes’ committee as trying to be transparent as it carried out oversight into whether the executive branch had violated civil liberties using the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
“There’s a very legitimate issue here as to whether or not an American’s civil liberties were violated,” he said.
But Nunes’ history in Congress undermines the idea that he is motivated by a good-faith concern that law enforcement officials might have conspired to abuse their surveillance powers and trample on civil liberties.
For one, Nunes has earned a reputation of being a staunch Trump loyalist — or “Trump’s stooge,” as his hometown newspaper, The Fresno Bee, called him last week.
Last year, Nunes dramatically announced that a whistleblower had shown him materials revealing that Obama administration officials had improperly “unmasked” the identities of Trump’s associates in intelligence reports based on surveillance, and that he intended to inform the White House about what he had learned. But it later emerged that Trump’s aides at the White House had shown him those materials, and other Republicans who later examined them concluded no one had been improperly unmasked.
That Nunes’ actions undermined his credibility does not mean, however, that law enforcement officials made no mistakes in the highly fraught political environment of the day. The Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, is finishing an inquiry into the handling of the Hillary Clinton email server investigation, and he is expected to deliver some harsh findings about senior Justice Department and FBI offi- cials in the Obama administration.
As part of its examination, Horowitz’s team uncovered the texts between two FBI officials, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who also worked on the Russia investigation in its early stages expressing intense animus for Trump. Horowitz brought those messages to the attention of Mueller, who immediately removed Strzok from his team; Page had already left by then. The final inspector general report is expected to sharply criticize both.
For now, however, Nunes’ memo is coming to define a political landscape already cratered by Trump’s recurring calls to reinvestigate Clinton; his firing of the former FBI director James Comey; the recent revelation that Trump ordered the firing of the special counsel last summer but backed off when his White House counsel threatened to resign; and Senate Republicans’ own attempts to discredit Steele, including two leading senators’ decision recently to ask the Justice Department to investigate whether he committed a crime.
For its part, the White House said Thursday that Trump would likely notify Congress of his intent to declassify the memo to clear the way for it to be made public.