President Trump has until Friday to decide what to do with the so-called Nunes memo, the document alleging widespread misbehavior at the FBI that the House Intelligence Committee voted along partisan lines to release to the public on Monday. Committee rules provide the White House a five-day window to object to declassification, which would trigger a full House vote on whether or not to release the document. But the administration has given no indication it will prevent the memo’s release.
Leaving the House chamber after the State of the Union Tuesday night, Trump assured a GOP lawmaker that he would release the memo “100 percent.” White House chief of staff John Kelly said in a radio interview Wednesday the memo will “be released here pretty quick, I think.”
The decision may be baked in, but Nunes’s critics aren’t going quietly. The ranking Democrat on House Intelligence, Adam Schiff, fired off an op-ed Wednesday saying the GOP memo document “cherry-picks facts, ignores others, and smears the FBI and the Justice Department—all while potentially revealing intelligence sources and methods.” And in an unusual step, the Trump-appointed FBI director, Christopher Wray, weighed in as well, citing “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.” (Late Wednesday night, Schiff accused Nunes of altering the memo. Nunes responded the edits were primarily for grammatical purposes as well as changes done at the request of the FBI and Schiff.)
Nunes apparently wasn’t impressed. “Having stonewalled Congress’s demands for information for nearly a year, it’s no surprise to see the FBI and DOJ issue spurious objections to allowing the American people to see information related to surveillance abuses at these agencies,” the chairman said in a statement. “Once the truth gets out, we can begin taking steps to ensure our intelligence agencies and courts are never misused like this again.”
It’s not obvious what the prudent course of action on the Nunes memo is. The FBI’s concerns about revealing intelligence sources and methods sounds legitimate—but it’s also a convenient excuse to block a memo that may expose wrongdoing or corruption within the Bureau.
And Nunes’s calls for transparency seem reasonable, except that the California Republican, who is close to Trump, is trying to release information on a sensitive subject without Democratic buy-in. Furthermore, it’s likely the memo would be used to undermine the ongoing special counsel investigation, which evolved out of the FBI’s probe that relied on the FISA warrant in question.
One More Thing—According to a CNN report, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein met with Trump at the White House in December to seek help from the president about document requests from the House Intelligence committee. Instead, Trump took the opportunity to grill Rosenstein on the status of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, and to ask Rosenstein whether he was “on my team.” Here’s more:
Must-Read of the Day—This article from Orin Kerr, a libertarian-leaning lawyer is a sensible critique of Nunes’s “release the memo” campaign. Kerr doesn’t provide a definitive answer—until we have all the facts, no one can—but it does cast doubt on the idea that the use of information from a biased source, in this case a dossier of opposition research on Donald Trump paid for by Democrats, is necessarily relevant or disqualifying.
Mueller Watch—The latest New York Times bombshell reports the special counsel is “zeroing in” on that infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting between campaign officials and a Russian lawyer. More specifically, Robert Mueller is looking into the effort by the White House to explain that meeting after the Times had learned of it in July 2017. The White House team, in conjunction with Trump’s private lawyers, botched the explanation in statements to the press. On a conference call, a former spokesman for Trump’s legal team now says, top White House aide Hope Hicks seems to have said something that interests prosecutors:
Mark Corallo, the former spokesman, has agreed to be interviewed by Mueller.
What Ever Happened? It’s been more than a year since President Trump took office and he still has no official science advisor. This isn’t a ceremonial role—the science advisor is the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, one of the several subdivisions of the Executive Office of the President that includes the National Security Council, the Council of Economic Advisers, and the Office of Management and Budget.
The office’s director is a simple presidential appointment; there’s no need for Senate confirmation. And back in January 2017, there appeared to be two possible candidate for the position. Both David Gelernter, a Yale computer scientist (and WEEKLY STANDARD contributing editor), and William Happer, a physicist at Princeton, interviewed with President-elect Trump in the weeks before the inauguration. But neither has heard much of anything from the White House since.
“I got the feeling that it wasn’t a high priority item that they were pushing hard on a number of other fronts, and this was just not one that they felt compelled to move on, and I didn’t feel any hostility,” says Happer, who adds his pre-inauguration meeting with Trump was the last he heard from anyone associated with the White House.
“Nothing ever came of it,” says Gelernter. “For me, that’s all for the best; I wasn’t sure whether I would or even could accept the position, although I was certainly interested in the idea. I was more disappointed than I had planned to be when I figured out that the whole thing was over. I never got any official word, but that’s not their fault. The whole thing was a low-key, casual process from the start.”
Gelernter says his last communication with the White House came last summer, during a meeting at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
The White House did not respond to multiple questions about the science advisor position and whether or not the president is actively looking for a candidate.
Photo of the Day
Donald Trump listens as Sue Wagner, employee of the Bank of Colorado which provided $1,000 bonuses to all full-time associates, speaks during a meeting with workers benefiting from tax reform legislation in the Oval Office on Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2018. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
2018 Watch—Trey Gowdy, the four-term Republican congressman from South Carolina, will not seek reelection this year. My colleague Jenna Lifhits has more:
Thanks to Sonny Bunch, readers at the Washington Post won’t forget that before Marvel’s Black Panther, there were quite a few comic-book and superhero movies with African-American leads—including and especially the Blade movies with Wesley Snipes.
Song of the Day—“The End Has No End” by the Strokes
