The only thing we can say with absolute certainty regarding the controversy over the Devin Nunes memo is this: It’s unwise to accept any claims made with absolute certitude about its contents and their meaning.
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said the memo is a “smear” filled with “falsehoods” to set up a “political purge.” Fox News contributor Sebastian Gorka claimed that it documents abuses “100 times” worse than those that led to the American Revolution. Chuck Schumer called it a “slanderous memo of GOP talking points.” None of them had read the memo about which they were so confidently telling us what to think.
The Nunes memo summarizes hundreds of pages of documents and testimony about the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Devin Nunes, the House Intelligence Committee chairman and the putative author of the memo, has never read the underlying materials. And while Adam Schiff, the leading Democrat on the committee, reportedly has read those documents, he nonetheless authored a Washington Post op-ed about the controversy so misleading as to make bad faith the unavoidable explanation. Schiff and Nunes know more than most people about the memo, and even they’re dealing with fragmentary information.
It’s as if everyone is describing in detail a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle after looking at a couple dozen of its pieces. Not that this lack of knowledge has prevented members of each tribe from making their arguments with passion. Certitude has so far appeared in inverse proportion to actual knowledge. In this respect, the debate perfectly symbolizes our politics in these hyper-polarized times.
As we went to press, the release of the memo was said to be imminent. It’s likely that by the time you read this, we’ll know exactly what it says. What we won’t have is a full understanding of what the material means.
Its author believes with the greatest conviction that the details of the FISA applications and the congressional testimony reviewed in the memo demonstrate that bad faith and partisan politics drove law-enforcement decision-making at the outset of the probe into the Trump campaign and Russia. We have reason to believe that the memo includes facts that bolster this argument. We’ve already seen too many examples of poor judgment from senior law-enforcement officials, and we’re confident that we’ll see more.
Yet many of our peers in the establishment media have been too dismissive of the possibility that politics played a role in decision-making about the investigations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. A good deal of disturbing material has come to light about how the FBI handled the Clinton investigation and sought to oppose a duly elected new president.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t serious questions about Russian influence in the 2016 election; about the demonstrated willingness of Trump associates to collude with the Russians to help Trump win; about their persistent dishonesty regarding contacts with the Russians during the campaign and afterwards; and about the president’s bizarre pleas for loyalty from those investigating him and his obsessive efforts to dismiss the entire affair as a hoax.
Donald Trump Jr. lied repeatedly about his meeting with representatives of the Russian government who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton. That’s true whether or not a senior DoJ official took shortcuts on a FISA application to surveil Carter Page. If Jared Kushner indeed asked a high-level Russian official for a scheme that would allow him to communicate with the Russian leadership outside normal diplomatic and intelligence channels, we ought to learn more about why—even if FBI agents working on the case exchanged hostile texts about Trump.
And even if the memo shows malfeasance on the part of federal law-enforcement officers—which we expect it will—it cannot in its four pages possibly justify the far-fetched conspiracy theorizing by some Trump supporters.
The broader conspiracy these folks are alleging is improbable. In its more imaginative version, the Republican attorney general, an early endorser of the president, needlessly (or suspiciously) recused himself from an investigation of the president despite having done nothing wrong (his misleading testimony to Congress a simple misunderstanding). This left the Republican deputy attorney general to work with the newly appointed Republican FBI director to target the Republican president who appointed them by downplaying and dismissing the broad institutional bias of federal law enforcement against that president back when he was merely the Republican nominee.
What’s more, the Republican former FBI director now serving as special counsel, appointed and supervised by the Republican deputy attorney general, is compromised for having hired some investigators who had given money to Democrats—giving money to Democrats being an obvious sign of bad judgment unless it’s the president himself, who gave money to Democrats for years so that he might one day be in a position to dismantle the deep state they’d set up to target Republicans.
Got that?
The people willing to advance such nonsense are unlikely to abandon it because some facts emerge to contradict their hypotheses. Just as stubborn are the people unwilling to entertain the possibility that senior law enforcement and intelligence officials did, in fact, allow their politics—or simply the expectation that Hillary Clinton was shortly to be their ultimate boss—improperly to shape the investigation.
The memo won’t make either group reexamine its presuppositions or its arguments. And we say that with absolute certainty.
