Nunes’ vicious, vapid memo
California Rep. Devin Nunes’ much-vaunted memo is the political equivalent of a shaggy-dog story, in which endless testimonials to an unseen canine’s superlative shagginess end with the disappointing presentation of an animal that is, after all, not so shaggy.
Based on classified information available to Nunes’ Intelligence Committee, the memo was said to reveal excesses “worse than Watergate” — which is perhaps what would be required to distract from the Nixonian echoes of President Trump’s standoff with federal authorities. Now that it’s been released, however, the scandal is not in the memo’s anticlimactic contents but in the nakedly partisan attempt by Republican lawmakers and Trump to undermine law enforcement in a desperate bid to protect their power.
The memo seeks to raise questions about the investigation of the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia by focusing on the FBI and Justice Department’s classified applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court permission to monitor a former Trump adviser, Carter Page. The memo points out that officials relied partly on a dossier compiled by a former British intelligence official, Christopher Steele, who was conducting research that, unbeknownst to the court, was surreptitiously paid for by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. From this shadow of a doubt, the document strives mightily to discredit the entire investigation and the ranking officials of both parties who oversaw it.
It’s worth noting that Steele is widely regarded as a credible professional who (as the memo notes) had been consulted by the FBI before, and that he was hired by a firm that had been conducting the same opposition research for Republicans. But even if one accepts the contention that Steele was tainted and unreliable, the memo does not detail the rest of the information federal officials relied upon, some of which might have arisen from the FBI’s investigation of Page’s Russian ties well before he worked for Trump. It’s clear that there is more to the story, given the objections of Intelligence Committee Democrats led by California Rep. Adam Schiff, whose competing memo has been bottled up, and, more remarkably, the FBI, now led by a Republican Trump personally chose, Christopher Wray.
Nor is it clear that Page is in any way integral to the investigation, which (as the memo also notes) started months earlier as a result of information about another Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team has not accused Page of any wrongdoing, but it has obtained guilty pleas from Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, as well as an indictment of his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.
What is disturbing about the memo, as Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain noted, is its escalation of the dishonest and corrosive campaign to undermine the investigation and the institutions behind it. Among the officials it disparages is Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, also a Republican promoted by Trump, who appointed and supervises the special counsel. There is little doubt that Mueller and his investigation are the memo’s ultimate targets, but if McCain is not Congress’ last courageous Republican, it should backfire badly.