Saturday, February 3, 2018

Defend the Constitution Against Enemies, Foreign and Domestic!

The central thesis of the Nunes memo is that there are people at the top of the FBI and Justice Department who were politically motivated to prevent Trump from becoming president. Nunes claims they started the investigation of the Trump campaign by concealing information about the political motives of the people who provided some of the information for a warrant to start spying on Carter Page, a foreign policy advisor who had ties to Russia. 

The memo claims (Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee who has seen the underlying documents disputes it) that the FISA warrant application relies heavily, if not completely, on information provided by Christopher Steele, the retired British MI6 agent who collected information on Trump’s Russian connections for Fusion GPS. The dossier claims that Trump was compromised by Russian Intelligence and might be being blackmailed. Fusion, who hired Steele, was paid by the Clinton campaign to do opposition research. The memo mentions that Steele, in sharing the information he had collected said he was passionate about not wanting Trump to become President. Similar sentiments were expressed in text messages between one of the top FBI investigators in the matter and his girlfriend who also worked for the FBI.  

According to the memo, this also taints the top leaders of the Justice Department and FBI at the time who signed off on the FISA application including Rod Rosenstein, Sally Yates, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe (all but Rosenstein have now been fired or forced out). Many people speculate that Trump wants to use this memo’s claims as an excuse to fire Rod Rosenstein, who oversees the Mueller investigation, in order to install someone who will either fire Mueller or reign in the investigation and suppress damaging lines of inquiry.

Others have gone into detail to dispute the claims in the memo, and the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, has written a rebuttal based on the underlying documents that will hopefully be released to the public soon, but I would just like to ask one general question.

Why should anyone be surprised that Steele, a former intelligence agent for America’s closest ally, Great Britain, would not want to see Trump become president? He had investigate and found credible information that Trump, his campaign manager, foreign policy advisors, and possibly family members were approached by and possibly compromised by the Russians and that Russia had a clear desire to help Trump and harm Clinton.  The people at Fusion GPS on receiving the dossier felt obligated to share it with the FBI. They authorized Steele to talk to the FBI to warn them. And why wouldn’t an FBI investigator who starts looking into and finding corroborating evidence for many of the claims in the Steele dossier, text his girlfriend who is also an FBI agent, to say that he hoped Trump, who was publicly saying all kinds of nice things about Putin, wouldn’t become president. These are the actions of patriots and allies who want to protect America. The question about that period should be why didn't anyone in the Trump campaign tell the FBI they were approached by Russians offering help?

And now the question that we should all be asking is why are Republicans including Speaker Ryan (he says he’s just allowing the memo’s release in the interest of transparency), accusing the Justice Department and the FBI of wrongdoing, when the wrongdoing boils down to trying to investigate a foreign power interfering with our electoral process on behalf of a campaign that is responding to their offers of help?

The conclusion we are getting closer to coming to is that in trying to shield Trump from the Mueller investigation more and more Republicans are crossing the line of upholding their oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. They seem to be enabling Trump in trying to obstruct justice, if not committing it themselves. And we, the American people, have to decide what we are going to do if we conclude that our President and his supporters in Congress fit the definition of domestic enemies.