The much-anticipated Nunes memo, released Friday after weeks of feverish build-up on the far-right, appears to be a dud. The declassified report accuses a group of current and former Justice Department and F.B.I. officials—including James Comey, his former deputy Andrew McCabe, and current Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—of approving applications to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page without disclosing that ex-British intelligence spy Christopher Steele, who compiled an intelligence dossier used in the warrant, was paid by Democratic sources and harbored anti-Trump bias. The most damning piece of evidence is the allegation that McCabe had testified in December that the warrant would not have been sought without the dossier, although two sources subsequently told The Daily Beast that particular claim is not true. Nowhere in the four-page memo is it noted that Page had already been on the F.B.I.’s radar, after he was targeted for recruitment by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service years earlier.
The consequences could be more than just a letdown for Trump. Rather than providing a smoking gun to discredit the Mueller investigation, it now seems that the president may have needlessly antagonized the F.B.I., and added to the perception that he is obstructing the Russia probe, with little political payoff. Some within the White House seemed to have anticipated that outcome, and had moved to downplay the memo’s significance in the days before its release. According to The Washington Post, Chief of Staff John Kelly had cautioned “that releasing the memo would not risk national security but that the document was not as compelling as some of its advocates had promised Trump.” Axios picked up whispers that several White House aides who had seen the memo were “fairly underwhelmed” and worried that it would be a lemon.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/02/donald-trump-christopher-wray-nunes-memo
The consequences could be more than just a letdown for Trump. Rather than providing a smoking gun to discredit the Mueller investigation, it now seems that the president may have needlessly antagonized the F.B.I., and added to the perception that he is obstructing the Russia probe, with little political payoff. Some within the White House seemed to have anticipated that outcome, and had moved to downplay the memo’s significance in the days before its release. According to The Washington Post, Chief of Staff John Kelly had cautioned “that releasing the memo would not risk national security but that the document was not as compelling as some of its advocates had promised Trump.” Axios picked up whispers that several White House aides who had seen the memo were “fairly underwhelmed” and worried that it would be a lemon.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/02/donald-trump-christopher-wray-nunes-memo
