Remember the Nunes memo concerning the FISA warrant for Carter Page? On Lawfare David Kris opines on the release of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act(FISA) warrant under an FOIA:
First, a huge amount of information is redacted in these FISA applications, but they still represent a monumental disclosure to the public. The government considers FISA applications to be very sensitive—and their disclosure, even heavily redacted, may have long-term, programmatic consequences long after we’re finished with President Trump. The government seems to have accepted that FOIA applies to FISA.
The balancing act when it comes to these sorts of things is very difficult, indeed. Did ham-handed President Trump just make it worse? Does he even get involved in this sort of thing? I don’t know.
But the real story here is the vindication of the Democrats’ position in the Nunes Memo imbroglio, at least according to Kris:
Now we have some additional information in the form of the redacted FISA applications themselves, and the Nunes memo looks even worse. In my earlier post, I observed that the FBI’s disclosures about Steele were contained in a footnote, but argued that this did not detract from their sufficiency: “As someone who has read and approved many FISA applications and dealt extensively with the FISA Court, I will anticipate and reject a claim that the disclosure was somehow insufficient because it appeared in a footnote; in my experience, the court reads the footnotes.” 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.
There’s also more detail on the previous disclosure from the House intelligence committee Democrats’ memo on how Steele went to the press with the “dossier” when FBI Director James Comey sent his October 2016 letter to Congress disclosing the possible newfound importance of the Weiner laptop in the Clinton investigation. According to the FISA applications, Steele complained that Comey’s action could influence the election. But when Steele went to the press, it caused FBI to close him out as an informant—facts which are disclosed and cross-referenced in the footnote in bold text.
Nunes’ mid-term opponent, Andrew Janz, has been handed a tool for his attempt to unseat Representative Nunes, and it should go something like this:
Nunes was given the opportunity to take on an extremely responsible position, and he treated it disrespectively and completely missed its point, which would be to monitor the President, not to defend him against all charges. This has endangered the Country, and so Nunes must be replaced.
And were the FISA judges biased against Republicans? Kris again:
But it is worth noting that—and as the Democrats previously pointed out—the judges who signed off on these four FISA applications were all appointed by Republican presidents, including one George H.W. Bush appointee (Anne Conway), two George W. Bush appointees (Rosemary Collyer and Michael Mosman) and one Reagan appointee (Raymond Dearie). I know some of those judges, and they certainly are not the types to let partisan politics affect their legal judgments.
