No, the Nunes memo doesn’t vindicate the president
Americans might be forgiven their bafflement over all the Washington hubbub flowing from Friday’s release of a convoluted three-and-a-half page memo by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee.
The document suggests darkly sinister Justice Department machinations behind obtaining a 2016 wiretap of Carter Page, a former Trump campaign official. Fox News personality Sean Hannity, an arch defender of President Trump, feverishly characterized it in advance as making “Watergate like stealing a Snickers bar.” Trump, in a tweet Saturday, claimed the memo “totally vindicates” him.
Well, no. This is, in reality, relatively small-bore stuff that intensely focuses on the evidence used (or withheld) by the FBI and the Justice Department in persuading a judge to grant a wiretap of Page.
While the memo raises some potentially troubling questions about FBI conduct, there’s clearly a whole other side that the public should be allowed to see before drawing conclusions. For now, it’s hard to regard this one-sided document as anything other than a political hit job meant to muddy the waters around special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian involvement in the 2016 election.
With that inquiry gathering speed — already yielding two indictments and two guilty pleas involving four former Trump campaign officials — this memo helps the president with a time-honored defense: prosecuting the prosecutors in the court of public opinion.
One key target is the Justice Department official who oversees the inquiry and played an ancillary role in the Page wiretap, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein, whom Trump nominated to his current post, is now in the White House crosshairs because, under department rules, only he can fire Mueller, and only for cause.
Despite Trump’s fulminations about vindication and “the Russian witch hunt,” even House Speaker Paul Ryan acknowledged that Nunes’ memo “does not implicate” Rosenstein or Mueller’s inquiry. And House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., said “the contents of this memo do not — in any way — discredit (Mueller’s) investigation.”
FBI leaders say the suddenly famous memo is a deeply flawed document. In a highly unusual move on Wednesday, the bureau issued a terse statement expressing “grave concerns” about its release and essentially accusing House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes’ aides, who wrote the memo, of cherry-picking facts to reach a conclusion.
The White House blew aside these concerns in agreeing to declassify the memo, which states that, in persuading a judge on the super-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to give them the Page wiretap in 2016, FBI officials relied — at least in part — on information from an explosive dossier written by a respected former British spy, Christopher Steele. According to the memo, the judge was not informed that Steele had been hired to write the dossier as part of opposition research funded by Hillary Clinton's campaign, or that Steele had made clear to Justice officials that he’s not a fan of Trump.
All of that is disconcerting, if true. But it doesn’t say what other information investigators had when they sought the wiretap or what the FBI’s obligations are in cases such as these. Some of that context might be in a separate Democratic memo the committee has refused to release. Let’s see it.
The FBI isn’t beyond reproach, and there’s an inspector general investigation underway that should offer fairminded analysis of the bureau’s possible shortcomings in handling not only the Russia investigation but also the October-surprise reopening of the Clinton email investigation.
This memo is hardly what the hyperventilating Hannity said would be “the biggest political scandal in American history.” To the extent there’s a scandal here, it is the weaponizing of sensitive intelligence information into one-sided censure.