It's (Still) Mueller Time

The Nunes memo arrived with all the fanfare of an incontinent warthog loose at the Louvre, and it stank just as badly.  

The main argument that this odious GOP-doctored summary of the House Intelligence Committee's info made is that somehow, those super-crafty Democrats tricked four separate FISA judges into extending surveillance on suspected foreign agent and Trump campaign staffer Carter Page by omitting that the "primary source" of the info on Page was the "paid-for-by-Democrats" Steele dossier, which is "compromised by partisanship". 

However, the Nunes memo can't prove any of this, because the memo's sources remain classified, so you just have to take Devin Nunes's word for it.  This is basically your drunken estranged uncle telling you that Bigfoot exists man, but the CIA has the proof in a file cabinet somewhere in a top secret mountain bunker in Virginia but you have to believe me, I'm not crazy.

The main assumption to bolster the argument the Nunes memo makes is that FISA court judges are dumber than a box of rusty hammers at the bottom of the Everglades, which apparently didn't sit too well with people who know FISA court judges.

The court that approved surveillance of a former campaign adviser to President Trump was aware that some of the information underpinning the warrant request was paid for by a political entity, although the application did not specifically name the Democratic National Committee or the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

A now-declassified Republican memo alleged that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was duped into approving the wiretap request by a politicized FBI and Justice Department. The memo was written by House Intelligence Committee Republicans and alleged a “troubling breakdown of legal processes” flowing from the government’s wiretapping of former Trump aide Carter Page.

But its central allegation — that the government failed to disclose a source’s political bias — is baseless, the officials said.

The Justice Department made “ample disclosure of relevant, material facts” to the court that revealed “the research was being paid for by a political entity,” said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

“No thinking person who read any of these applications would come to any other conclusion but that” the work was being undertaken “at the behest of people with a partisan aim and that it was being done in opposition to Trump,” the official said.

Former senior Justice Department officials who handled applications for wiretap warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) say that such applications typically include dozens of pages and undergo rigorous vetting.

“We didn’t put in every fact, but we put in enough facts to allow the court to judge bias and motive and credibility of the sourcing,” said Matthew G. Olsen, former deputy assistant attorney general for national security who oversaw the Justice Department’s FISA program from 2006 to 2009.

The Republican memo, he said, “is unconvincing and one-sided. It raises more questions than it answers.”

If the FISA application to surveil Page referred to funding by political opponents “or included similar references that revealed a motivation against then-candidate Trump, even if they did not name the DNC . . . then the FISA applications would be fine,” said David Kris, a FISA expert who led the Justice Department’s National Security Division from 2009 to 2011.

It's patently clear that there are other intelligence sources besides the Steele Dossier that were followed up on.  The last paragraph of the Nunes memo even says so.

The Page FISA application also mentions information regarding fellow Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, but there is no evidence of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos. The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016 by FBI agent Pete Strzok. Strzok was reassigned by the Special Counsel's Office to FBI Human Resources for improper text messages with his mistress, FBI Attorney Lisa Page (no known relation to Carter Page), where they both demonstrated a clear bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton, Whom Strzok had also investigated. The Strzok/Lisa Page texts also refect extensive discussions about the investigation, orchestrating leaks to the media, and include a meeting with Deputy Director McCabe to discuss an "insurance" policy against President Trump's election.

Everything but the bolded sentence in that entire memo is Nunes trying to hide that bolded sentence.  Why he included it I don't know, because instead of pointing the blame at FBI agent Peter Strzok, it just proves that there's other intel sources besides the Steele Dossier that started the FISA warrant process in the first place.

Anyway, the game's still afoot.