House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., accused “certain members of the press” of working for the Democratic Party on Monday, while addressing divergent takes among journalists and experts about whether this weekend’s release of top-secret documents related to the wiretapping of one-time Trump campaign aide Carter Page adds credence or detracts from his panel’s memo on alleged surveillance abuse.
During an interview on Fox News, host Laura Ingraham referred to a section in a Lawfare blog post by David Kris — focusing on the role the infamous Trump dossier written by ex-British spy Christopher Steele played in federal officials convincing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to approve spy warrants on Page for his suspicious ties to Russia — which she said Nunes’ critics have often repeated.
“Now we can see that the footnote disclosing Steele’s possible bias takes up more than a full page in the applications, so there is literally no way the FISA Court could have missed it. The FBI gave the court enough information to evaluate Steele’s credibility,” the section from Kris’s piece reads.
Nunes was unimpressed, lopping Lawfare, which was co-founded by Benjamin Wittes, a friend of ex-FBI Director James Comey, into the group of Democrat-aligned outlets.
“One of the things you have to realize that with all the press. Certain members of the press work for the Democratic Party. And the Lawfare blog is one of them,” the California Republican said. “Every day there’s a new attack. I don’t put a lot of credibility into what they say.”
In particular, Nunes explained that it was the reliance on the unverified dossier — which suggests Russia has compromising information against President Trump — that was cause for concern.
[Byron York: FISA warrant application supports Nunes memo]
“The fact of the matter is you have to present verified information to the court. Let’s not forget, to open up a counterintelligence investigation into a campaign, unprecedented. But then to use these invasive types of capabilities on an American citizen that should be very, very seldom used. In this case, not only did they use it, but they used it with information from the other candidate’s campaign, and it wasn’t verified,” he said.
The House Intelligence Committee memo, based on intelligence documents, was released in February. It found Steele’s dossier formed an essential part of the initial and all three renewal FISA applications against Page and that the research’s Democratic financial supporters, the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, were omitted from the FISA applications. At the time, Nunes berated the media for the negative coverage of the memo.
The Democrats on the intelligence panel quickly responded with a partially redacted memo of their own, arguing that the DOJ and FBI made an appropriate case for spy authority, even though Steele had later been dropped as a source. The DOJ informed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court “accurately that Steele was hired by politically-motivated U.S. person and entities and that his research appeared intended for use ‘to discredit’ Trump’s campaign,” the Democratic memo said. It added that the FBI “properly” notified FISC after it terminated Steele as a source for making “unauthorized disclosures to the media,” and that the GOP memo cited no evidence to support the notion that the FBI, prior to the initial October 2016 application, knew or should have known of any alleged inappropriate contact with the media.
Long after attention on the FISA warrants against Page waned, the Justice Department, in compliance with the Freedom of Information Act, released more than 400 pages of highly redacted, top-secret documents late Saturday evening related to the 2016 application for the FISA warrant taken out on Page, in addition to three renewal applications.
Many of the individuals in the matter were not named in the documents — listed instead with such monikers as “Candidate #1,” “Candidate #2,” “Source #1,” and “Source #2” — which Nunes snarkily described as federal officials resorting to “word puzzles” to make their case. After Ingraham noted they only referred to the research being back by an opposition effort to Trump, Nunes said that was correct, “but they could have easily said that it was paid for by Candidate #2.”
Asked why they didn’t say that, Nunes replied emphatically: “I believe because that’s crazy.”
Page, Nunes added, “had his rights abused.”
