The following commentary by the Editorial Board of the Washington Post was posted on their website February 2, 2018:
EVEN TAKEN at face value, the infamous Nunes memodoes nothing to discredit the Russia investigation, which was President Trump’s transparent aim in authorizing its release on Friday. It also does little to show abuse of surveillance law, which was the pretext on which House leaders justified its disclosure.
The memo argues that the FBI may have abused special spying authority under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), obtaining a warrant to surveil former Trump adviser Carter Page using information from the controversial Steele dossier, a collection of allegations about Mr. Trump and his circle assembled by a former British intelligence agent with funding from Democrats. The memo claims that the FBI did not disclose the dossier’s full provenance in its application for a FISA warrant, suggesting that the warrant against Mr. Page — and, therefore, perhaps, the early stages of the Russia investigation — was tainted. Continue reading “The Nunes memo shows the opposite of what Trump hoped it would prove”