February 18, 2018

Why Devin Nunes's Memo Would Never Hold Up in Court

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a16328815/nunes-memo-revelations/
"Don’t forget, Page was under surveillance in 2013, three years before the events at the heart of the Nunes memo. Earlier this week Asha Rangappa, a former FBI special agent, wrote at Just Security that she wanted to see five basic questions answered by the Nunes memo. The document, I suspect she will say, goes 0-5. It does not tell us what other evidence the feds have or had against Page. It doesn’t tell us anything about the circumstances that drew federal attention to Page to begin with. It doesn’t tell us that Deputy Attorney Rod Rosenstein was involved in 2016 in some vast conspiracy with other law enforcement officials to subvert the election chances of Donald Trump or improperly undermine his presidency. And it doesn’t tell us boo about Robert Mueller, the special counsel. If this is the best Trump and Nunes can come up with to derail the special counsel, I suspect they’ve failed. Good news for those of us hoping that someone, somewhere, pushes through Congressional obstruction and presidential obfuscation to get to the heart of what all of these Trump people were doing so often in the company of all those Russians. Another thing the Nunes memo doesn’t do? It didn’t accuse any federal law enforcement officials of breaking any laws or rules or procedures. The big winner in all of this, of course, is Vladimir Putin. What a week for him! On Monday, his man in Washington, Donald Trump, refused to impose those sanctions Congress voted overwhelmingly to impose on the Russians as punishment for their interference in our elections. And today the White House and Congressional Republicans made this reckless move to undermine the credibility of America’s intelligence and law enforcement communities. As Sen. John McCain, the ailing Republican from Arizona just put it, “if we continue to undermine our own rule of law, we are doing Putin’s work for him.” Indeed, Donald Trump and Devin Nunes are doing just that."