The release of “THE MEMO” last week doesn’t seem to have affected much outside the very small world of Capitol Hill partisans and their closest and most rabid online followers.
Yes, FISA courts are routinely abused and long have been — to paraphrase a saying used elsewhere in law, you get a FISA warrant against any ham sandwich you like. And of course, although the memo takes pains to make it seem underhanded, investigators don’t typically share mitigating evidence when they seek surveillance warrants in any court. That’s the difference between a warrant hearing and a trial — the defense’s point of view is not typically represented in the former.
Finally, the Steele dossier, which Hillary Clinton’s campaign underwrote and which BuzzFeed unwisely published over a year ago despite acknowledging parts of it were false, has been mostly scoffed at in the time since anyway. And so the revelations in this newly released memo, that Christopher Steele’s information gathering methods were less than sound, and Steele himself less than truthful with the FBI, don’t come as too big a shock.
In short, Democrats probably never had as much to fear or to lose from this memo’s release as House Republicans had hoped. But they had one particular argument against its release that meant something, that merited consideration. In the run-up to last week’s release, Democrats frequently shared a song and dance about how the declassification of the information in the memo would be incredibly damaging to national security.
So if you read the memo over the weekend and scratched your head, wondering what on earth could be so sensitive in it as to damage national security, you’re not alone. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who had earlier claimed the memo’s release would be “extraordinarily reckless” and could “harm…ongoing investigations” was not even confronted with this during his appearance on ABC’s “This Week.” But the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, perhaps sensing that this would be on viewers’ minds, voluntarily offered up this explanation in order to justify his main talking point of recent weeks:
“[T]he problem with this…is if you have a neighbor who’s buying fertilizer, lots of fertilizer, but has no yard, and you have concerns about it, and you want to call the FBI, you’re now going to wonder, is that FBI going to hold my name in confidence or this information in confidence? What if this becomes politicized? …And other sources of information are going to decide not to share with the FBI because they can’t rely on our committee not to be partisan in the handling of that information. And that’s a deep disservice that ultimately makes the country less safe.
Well now. If your neighbor does appear to be building a fertilizer bomb, I’d advise you not to report him to the FBI right away. Wait first until you’re sure he isn’t a member of Congress gathering his notes to answer questions on a Sunday political talk show.
