Andrew C. McCarthy on the Schiff memo
McCarthy says the Schiff memo is worse for the Democrats than for the Republicans.
An excerpt from McCarthy:
To be clear, the only reason Steele’s own biases have any pertinence is that the FBI and the DOJ relied vicariously on Steele’s credibility, as a substitute for their failure to corroborate his informants’ information. It was improper to do this. Yet even if a prosecutor goes down a certain road wrongly, the duty to be candid with the tribunal still applies. The prosecutor is obliged to tell the whole story about potential bias, not a skewed version.
Schiff’s memo struggles mightily, and futilely, to demonstrate that Steele’s credibility issues were sufficiently disclosed. But that is a side issue. The question is whether Steele’s informants were credible. To the limited extent that committee Democrats grapple with this problem, they tell us that, after the first FISA application, the FBI and the DOJ provided additional information that corroborated Steele’s informants. There are four problems with this…
Read it. It’s complicated, but well worth reading in its entirety.
However, I’m pretty sure that most Democrats who bother to read about the Schiff memo at all will do so in the MSM rather than plow through anything McCarthy has to say in National Review, and they will conclude that the Schiff memo effectively neutralizes the Nunes memo and Grassley-Graham (which they’ve also read about in the MSM, if at all), even though it doesn’t.
That’s the way these topics tend to work for most people, especially the complicated topics that take some patience and logic to follow. Read a little summary in the MSM and you’re done. Or read the headlines.
McCarthy has another piece on the Schiff memo, too. An excerpt:
At the Washington Examiner, Byron York picks up on something I wish I had highlighted: The Schiff memo’s focus on past Russian intelligence efforts (in 2013) to recruit Page to become an agent for Russia. As Byron notes, the Schiff memo claims that “Steele’s information about Page was consistent with the FBI’s assessment of Russian intelligence efforts to recruit him and his connections to Russian persons of interest.”
The fact that a foreign power is trying to recruit an American to become an agent for that foreign power is not a sufficient basis to issue a surveillance warrant against the American under FISA. It would, of course, be sufficient to issue a warrant against the foreign spies who are making the recruitment efforts, but it is not enough for a warrant against the American citizen who is the target of the recruitment effort.
To get a surveillance warrant under FISA (i.e., the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, as codified at Title 50, U.S. Code, Sections 1801 et seq.), the FBI and the Justice Department must establish probable cause that the person to be monitored under the warrant is acting as an active, purposeful agent of a foreign power ”” not that the foreign power hopes to turn him into such an agent.
McCarthy goes on to say that the Steele dossier contained the only allegation of anything even approaching the necessary evidence, and it was so suspect that the FISA court should never have issued a warrant on those grounds. Furthermore, the FBI was required to interview Page (who had already demonstrated on many occasions his willingness to cooperate with FBI interviews) before seeking a warrant.
McCarthy is puzzled as to why the FBI and the FISA court made the decisions they did.
He’s been churning out these lucid and intelligent columns on the collusion/dossier story ever since the beginning, and for the most part he’s been spot on about it. But how many people does this reach, and how many care? I see his efforts as something like those of the grammarians trying to get people to understand how to use “I” and “me” when they seem determined to toss out the rules. He’s swimming against the tide of ignorance, indifference, and worse.
The FISA rules are there for a reason: to protect us while still allowing the government to investigate. If way too many people argue for those rules when it’s politically expedient and against them when it’s politically expedient, we are in for very bad times. Actually, we’ve been in those times for quite some time now. Call it a banana republic, call it tyranny, call it chaos, call it what you will.
I’ve posted this clip before, and I’ll probably post it again:
Interested readers might also consult the very fine pieces on this topic posted at The Federalist by Mollie Hemingway and on Bookworm Room.
“Democrats who bother to read about the Schiff memo at all will do so in the MSM rather than plow through anything McCarthy has to say in National Review, and they will conclude that the Schiff memo effectively neutralizes the Nunes memo and Grassley-Graham (which they’ve also read about in the MSM, if at all), even though it doesn’t.
That’s the way these topics tend to work”
To paraphrase an old sexist saw: “Keep ’em dumb, barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen.”
“I’ve posted this clip before, and I’ll probably post it again”
There are some clips and quotes that need to be on the internet equivalent of “speed dial” —
‘McCarthy is puzzled as to why the FBI and the FISA court made the decisions they did’
Well if he still puzzled about the FBI then he is the world’s most naé¯ve former US attorney. The FISA court is more puzzling I agree but even then is it that shocking that some federal judges just signed off on what a bunch career justice bureaucrats said?
Byron York wrote last week that Carter Page’s trip to Moscow was well known in advance and the names of the two Russians was even known but the CIA couldn’t confirm that the meeting took place.
Why didn’t the CIA eavesdrop on this meeting?
Welcome to Bush II’s era, a few years after his inauguration, Trum.
All kinds of Byzantine plots going on in the USA, a nation founded in favor of a Roman/Greek goddess called Liberty.
There are some clips and quotes that need to be on the internet equivalent of “speed dial” –
I use the Russian program “coodclip” for that.
Reality’s truth is a mortal threat to both the fool and the ideologue.
Those who express inconvenient truths are ignored by the fool and defamed by the ideologue.
Fools are the natural prey of ideologues. The foolish of today are busy enabling the fashioning of the future chains of their enslavement.
McCarthy talks about how the FISA application engaged in “epistemological contortions” to conceal the dossier’s Clinton campaign origins:
If I had been the judge on the FISA court and read those “epistemological contortions”, I would have asked for more information. Should we assume the FISA judge didn’t do that?
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”
Y’all got on this boat for different reasons, but y’all come to the same place. So now I’m asking more of you than I have before. Maybe all. Sure as I know anything, I know this – they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people… better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin’. I aim to misbehave.
Captain Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) Serenity
*Never worshipped the writer of Buffy Vampire slayer, so I can still quote Firefly without guilt lol*
McCarthy: “the FBI and the Justice Department must establish probable cause that the person to be monitored under the warrant is acting as an active, purposeful agent of a foreign power – not that the foreign power hopes to turn him into such an agent.”
According to Orin Kerr:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/03/opinion/nunes-memo-trump-mueller.html
Kerr, right-wing libertarianish, doesn’t see a problem with the warrant. McCarthy is still arguing that the Steele dossier was the only essential evidence, a very iffy proposal at this point. But even if one hits this bar, Kerr still doesn’t see a problem.
Yes, Firefly! The crew of the Serenity would certainly have come running at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Sorry, I don’t mean to thread jack.
Neo: “Furthermore, the FBI was required to interview Page (who had already demonstrated on many occasions his willingness to cooperate with FBI interviews) before seeking a warrant. “
From the Dem Memo:
He’s swimming against the tide of ignorance, indifference, and worse.
I see worse. As the film clip suggests, we are fortunate to have legal structures that lessen what would otherwise be a hell world of oceanic ignorance. Consider that so far we’ve seen no accountability for gross abuses that took place under the prior administration. Will Obama’s IRS scoundrels ever face justice? Not likely.
Then again, how deep the abyss of hopelessness if Hillary was president? At least the Trump-MSM circus is entertaining. May he continually drive them mad until intelligent ownership arrives.
The bigger challenge are corrupt journalism schools and their leftist academic environment, which have mostly thrown away standards that required reporters to be “truthful, accurate, objective, impartial, fair, and accountable to the public.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standards
Manju:
It would be a neat trick for the FBI to have interviewed Page in March of 2016 about a meeting with the Russians that didn’t take place till July of 2016.
It’s not that the FBI was required to have interviewed Page about just anything at any point in time. They were required to have interviewed him about the things that prompted them to get the FISA warrant to surveil him. Those things had not yet occurred when they interviewed him.
The Left sent us an overcooked or was it undercooked, Manju, with the New York Times subscription selling point.
I think they have been hard at work with the propaganda.
“Willful” ignorance, to be more precise.
Surely the FISA judges are wise and learned people who would require high standards of evidence from the FBI. Right? Well, let’s take a look at who they are. Go here:
http://www.fisc.uscourts.gov/current-membership
The Feds in D.C. would likely go to one of the three judges based there. Click on the names and read the bios. I’m not a psychic, but I believe, based on the limited bios, that Judge Boasberg, or Judge Contreras might be possible pushovers for an over-reaching FISA application.
Every ambitious operator knows how to game the system when they feel the need. IMHO, the top of the FBI and DOJ believed, as stated by Agent Strzok in texts, that stopping the Trump train was a matter of national urgency. Going to a friendly judge was necessary to execute their insurance policy. Of course, I might be wrong.
J. J.,
I was wondering about their backgrounds. Do you really think some of them are push overs? They’re all appointed by the Chief Justice. I doubt he’d appoint anyone not up for the job.
That said, only two FISA court judges have ever been appointed to an Appeals Court. Conrad Cyr to the 1st Circuit and Lawrence Pierce to the 2nd Circuit.
I wonder if judges dislike being appointed to the FISA court. I know one judge resigned because he disliked it so much.
Ymar Sakar Says:
February 27th, 2018 at 4:25 pm
There are some clips and quotes that need to be on the internet equivalent of “speed dial” –
I use the Russian program “coodclip” for that.
* * *
Wait, wait — on a thread about Russian interference in American affairs, you are advocating voluntarily putting a RUSSIAN software app on your computer??
Quick! Somebody call the FBI!
McCarthy isn’t quite saying this. He’s not saying the law requires an interview per se.
He’s saying that FISA requires that the DOJ and FBI demonstrate that surveillance “is necessary because the information sought ‘cannot reasonably be obtained by normal investigative techniques.’”
He’s also saying that “such techniques include interviewing the alleged foreign agent.”
He then concedes that an (alleged) “jihadist is not likely to sit down with FBI agents and tell them everything he knows.” Why is this a concession? Because the same would apply to an (alleged) Russian agent, of course.
But Carter Page is the exception, or so his argument goes. Why? Because he was told the truth in the past. Ergo, surveillance was not necessary.
There are problems with this argument…
Wait, wait – on a thread about Russian interference in American affairs, you are advocating voluntarily putting a RUSSIAN software app on your computer??
It’s like 15+ years old. Which may actually make it more dangerous due to kGB funding back then.
The new Russian Fed intel, has to work with Putin’s former kGB staff on a new era. Instead of disinfo, they went more into pro info, bolstering Putin’s cult of personality and assassinating annoying people inside or outside of Russia. These are “wetwork” or active operations, rather than the misleading indirect passive operations they did to fund the anti war Vietnam protests.
Also, the Manju food table knows better than to get sucked into certain topics with people here that he wasn’t scripted to counter. When ya going to get your AI upgraded so you can deal with my stuff, Manju, maybe when the Leftist alliance admits to being allies with Islamic Jihad perhaps…
http://coodclip.software.informer.com/
Free for decades as shareware.
You can stack up a bunch of images and text, no matter how large. In USA, we copy into the clipboard. In Russia, clipboard copies us.
Nice for all those quotes that one would usually have to keep in a notepad or text file.
“‘He either fears his fate too much,
Or his desert is small,
Who fears to put it to the touch,
And win or lose it all.’
dexiansheng: “Do you really think some of them are push overs? They’re all appointed by the Chief Justice. I doubt he’d appoint anyone not up for the job.”
Well, consider this:
Judge Boasberg:
55 years old, a native of San Francisco, CA. Degrees from Yale and Oxford. Practiced law in San Francisco and then D.C. Nominated by Barack Obama and confirmed in 2011.
The progressive bona fides are pretty obvious.
Also, Judge Contreras:
56 years old and a native of New York City.
Degrees from Florida State and Pennsylvania U. Law School.
Private practice in D.C. for three years before going to work as an attorney for the government. Nominated by Barack Obama and confirmed in 2011.
Also shows progressive bona fides.
Maybe it means nothing, but data points worth considering when inexplicable decisions are made.
First a couple of links, then the point of it all.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/how-to-dig-up-dirt-from-the-russians/article/2011707
“The Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee want to both shore up Steele and at the same time walk away from him and his dossier whistling nonchalantly. It’s a trying and tricky job, which may explain why the memo has a strained quality compared with the simpler and shorter narrative of the majority memo. Simpler, shorter and less strained doesn’t necessarily mean the majority’s memo is the correct of the two. But it’s worth reading both to see which one is trying a bit too hard.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/david-hogg-is-fair-game-for-critics/
“For this advocacy – and that’s what it is – Hogg has been feted as a key leader within a “mass movement” that is determined to reform America; he has been praised for his attempt to “force change”; he has been cast, including by himself, as a lion who refuses to back down; and, in some of the more cunning quarters of the left, he has been turned into a walking demonstration of the need to lower the voting age. At no point has anyone hosting him suggested that his relevance is limited to his capacity to describe his experience; rather, he has in every instance been asked to join a public political fight – a fight, remember, that relates to nothing less foundational than the American Bill of Rights.
And yet, when other Americans have seen fit to respond, Hogg’s defenders have cast him upon the instant in diametrically opposite terms: As an irrelevance; as a mere “kid”; as a grieving ornament who sits well outside of our national conversation. This is extraordinary. How obvious, one wonders, do his champions intend to make it that they are using him to launder their views? And how clearly must they reveal that, despite their protestations to the contrary, they in fact have no respect whatsoever for his agency?”
* * *
In both cases the Left / MSM displays a consistent Modus Operandi, which I am now going to be looking for in other posts & articles & discussions.
(1) put forward a spokes
manbeing (or topic) and demand that it be taken totally seriously or the world will end;(2) encounter reasonable rebuttals to said being or topic;
(3) insist that the rebutter is taking the being or topic too seriously, and downplay it’s importance.
“Some people say..” that the Left is hypocritical; “but I say..” they are very, very aware of how their target audience will hear the dialogue, and will either not notice or not care about the discrepancy.
Victor D. Hansen with an expansive “summary” of the Russia-gate (can’t we get a new descriptor?) imbroglio to date.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/russia-spreading-chaos-fooling-media-exposing-fbi/
“Start with two givens: Vladimir Putin is neither stupid nor content to watch an aging, shrinking, corrupt, and dysfunctional – but still large and nuclear – Russia recede to second- or third-power status. From 2009 to 2015, in one of the most remarkable and Machiavellian efforts in recent strategic history, Putin almost single-handedly parlayed a deserved losing hand into a winning one. He pulled this off by flattering, manipulating, threatening, and outsmarting an inept and politically obsessed Obama administration.
…
A review of Russian inroads, presented in no particular order, is one of the more depressing chapters in post-war U.S. diplomatic history.
…
The verdict on Russia, the Obama administration, and the Clinton campaign is now becoming clearer. Russian reset resurrected Putin’s profile and hurt U.S. interests. It grew out of a partisan rebuke of the Bush administration’s perceived harshness to Russia and was later massaged to help Barack Obama’s reelection campaign by granting Russia concessions in hopes of a foreign-policy success that would lead to perceived calm. Russia deliberately inserted itself into the 2016 election, as it had in previous elections, because 1) it had suffered few if any prior consequences, 2) it wanted to sow chaos in the American political system, and 3) it saw a way to warp Clinton’s efforts to smear Donald Trump, first, no doubt to compromise a likely President Clinton, and, in unexpected fashion, later to undermine an actual President Trump.
At very little cost, Russia has embarrassed American democracy, played the media for the partisans they are, completely discredited the Clinton campaign and name, and created a year of nonstop hysteria to undermine the Trump administration.
And it is not over yet.”
Oh, the irony! I can recall a couple of times during the long 2016 Presidential primaries, when Neo posted that Sir Thomas More clip as a warning against what Donald Trump might do. What a joke that turned out to be! With all that has come out since those times, it looks increasing like there were many persons within the Obama administration who sought to discredit or sabotage Mr. Trump, including use of the FISA court.
To paraphrase Thomas More, “It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for Hillary Clinton?”
I don’t blame Mr. Trump for being angry and for fighting back. That’s a very normal reaction to what was done to him. Hopefully, the full truth will come out, and we can get some real political reform (even if at the expense of the Obama legacy).
Yankee:
The warning (Thomas More) is for all time and for all men. We certaintly don’t have a saint in the oval office (never have had one and never will) so the challenge is to check his excesses when or if they occur.
Yankee Says:
February 28th, 2018 at 5:16 pm
To paraphrase Thomas More, “It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for Hillary Clinton?”
* * *
Indeed.
My favorite Speed Quote is lifted from Ben Franklin:
“Collusion is always acceptable in the first person – our collusion; it is only in the third person – their collusion – that it is treason.”
The problem is that the legal excesses of the Obama administration were never dealt with, and those of the Clintons were only partially investigated at best. This situation where one side can do pretty much whatever it likes, while another side is blocked, stalemated, or endlessly investigated cannot continue. It’s not healthy for the country. (Another problem is that the Left has so much invested in the narrative of Mr. Obama as scandal-free, and themselves as morally superior, and so therefore they cannot do wrong.) At some point, this “fever” has to break.
As for Sir Thomas More, perhaps he is over-rated? If he was really so smart, then he would not have gotten his head chopped off! Consider the context of the times, with England under the threat of domination from Spain and the Papacy, and with Henry VIII as only the second monarch after a long period of civil war (War of the Roses, 1455 to 1487). Compare also Thomas More to Thomas Becket, murdered in 1170 after repeatedly defying the king, during a period which likewise followed a long civil war (The Anarchy of 1135 to 1154).
Both of these King Henries (II and VIII) attempted to compromise with their defiant Thomases (Becket and More), but were unsuccessful. One can imagine them saying at one point, “Look here, Thomas, I am trying to hold this nation together and to prevent the death of many real people during civil war. Can you not get with the program and work with me?”
People were too distracted with the Left’s mind control propaganda bout Bush Hitler II and Cheney, to worry about Clinton’s perjury, Watergate, and other issues with their President messiah boy Hussein.
Americans were duped because Americans wanted to be duped and conned.
I also didn’t jump on the Trum band wagon in 2016, declaring that everything would be all right after his election/inauguration.
I knew, better than others in the US, exactly what we were facing.
It’s easy to flip up and down reacting to Leftist and US propaganda. I got tired of that roller coaster a long time ago.