A secret, highly contentious Republican memo reveals that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein approved an application to extend surveillance of a former Trump campaign associate shortly after taking office last spring, according to three people familiar with it.
The renewal shows that the Justice Department under President Trump saw reason to believe that the associate, Carter Page, was acting as a Russian agent. But the reference to Mr. Rosenstein’s actions in the memo — a much-disputed document that paints the investigation into Russian election meddling as tainted from the start — indicates that Republicans may be moving to seize on his role as they seek to undermine the inquiry.
The memo’s primary contention is that F.B.I. and Justice Department officials failed to adequately explain to an intelligence court judge in initially seeking a warrant for surveillance of Mr. Page that they were relying in part on research by an investigator, Christopher Steele, that had been financed by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Democrats who have read the document say Republicans have cherry-picked facts to create a misleading and dangerous narrative. But in their efforts to discredit the inquiry, Republicans could potentially use Mr. Rosenstein’s decision to approve the renewal to suggest that he failed to properly vet a highly sensitive application for a warrant to spy on Mr. Page, who served as a Trump foreign policy adviser until September 2016.
A handful of senior Justice Department officials can approve an application to the secret surveillance court, but in practice that responsibility often falls to the deputy attorney general. No information has publicly emerged that the Justice Department or the F.B.I. did anything improper while seeking the surveillance warrant involving Mr. Page.
Mr. Trump has long been mistrustful of Mr. Rosenstein, the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, who appointed the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and now oversees his investigation into Mr. Trump’s campaign and possible obstruction of justice by the president. Mr. Trump considered firing Mr. Rosenstein last summer. Instead, he ordered Mr. Mueller to be fired, then backed down after the White House counsel refused to carry out the order, The New York Times reported last week.
Mr. Trump is now again telling associates that he is frustrated with Mr. Rosenstein, according to one official familiar with the conversations.
Again, the GOP plan here is to paint the FISA warrants on
foreign nationals who were involved with members of the Trump campaign as "illegal FISA surveillance on the Trump campaign" itself. As such, anyone involved in approval for the surveillance is part of the "Obama Deep State" and must be purged from the Department of Justice. Retaliatory idiocy on the part of Trump has claimed several people in the DoJ and FBI, Sally Yates, Preet Bhrahra, James Comey,
and now FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe stepped down Monday, multiple sources familiar with the matter told NBC News.
McCabe will remain on the FBI payroll until he is eligible to retire with full benefits in mid-March, the sources said.
One source familiar said McCabe was exercising his retirement eligibility and characterized his decision as "stepping aside."
McCabe has been at the center of ongoing tensions between the White House and the FBI and has reportedly been under pressure to quit from President Donald Trump, whose campaign is being investigated for possible collusion with Russia.
McCabe was forced out, no question. Trump is systematically firing civil servants who move to question his wrongdoing. If Obama had fired anyone in the FBI who was investigating his campaign, Republicans would have delivered articles of impeachment before the end of the day. Now, government workers, even Republicans like Comey and McCabe, are all suspects to be purged.
This is how Trump is planning to justify cause to fire Rod Rosenstein, and appoint a new Deputy AG who will fire Mueller. saying that the FISA surveillance is "fruit of the poisoned tree" He will be purged too just like McCabe..
And no, Republicans in Congress aren't going to lift a finger to protect Mueller when Rosenstein's replacement fires him.
Republican
lawmakers warned President Trump on Sunday not to fire Robert S.
Mueller III, but showed little sense of urgency to advance long-stalled
legislation to protect the special counsel despite a report that Mr.
Trump had tried to remove him last June.
“I
don’t think there’s a need for legislation right now to protect
Mueller,” Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House
majority leader, said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Right now there’s not an issue. So why create one when there isn’t a place for it?”
Mr. McCarthy’s comments, similar to those made earlier by other Republicans, come amid bipartisan outrage over a report last week in The New York Times that Mr. Trump sought in June to fire Mr. Mueller, who is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The
president backed down only after Donald F. McGahn II, the White House
counsel, threatened to quit rather than execute Mr. Trump’s order.
Democrats immediately seized on the report,
saying they would try to ensure that continuing budget negotiations
included legislation to protect the special counsel. But on Sunday, even
Republicans who have backed such a bill appeared to settle instead on
providing a warning to the president.
“It’s
pretty clear to me that everybody in the White House knows it would be
the end of President Trump’s presidency if he fired Mr. Mueller,”
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said on ABC’s “This Week.”
The FISA surveillance nonsense is justification for Republicans to back Trump when he tries to fire Rosenstein and eventually Mueller. I don't believe a word Sen. Graham says about the Trump regime being "over" if Mueller is fired. Luckily,
Mueller's isn't the only investigation in town, and Trump knows it.
Congress late last year received “extraordinarily important new documents” in its investigation of President Donald Trump and his campaign’s possible collusion with the 2016 Russian election hacking, opening up significant new lines of inquiry in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s probe of the president, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) says in an exclusive new interview.
Warner, the intel committee’s top Democrat, says “end-of-the-year document dumps” produced “very significant” revelations that “opened a lot of new questions” that Senate investigators are now looking into, meaning the inquiry into Trump and the Russia hacking—already nearly a year old—will not be finished for months longer. “We’ve had new information that raises more questions,” Warner says in the interview, an extensive briefing on the state of the Senate’s Trump-Russia probe for The Global Politico, our weekly podcast on world affairs.
Warner also warns about a “coordinated” attack by the president and “Trump zealots” in the House of Representatives to undermine the legitimacy of the investigations against him, an effort Warner says includes the president’s threats to fire special counsel Robert Mueller and other officials as well as a secret Republican memo alleging “shocking” FBI surveillance abuse against Trump that Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) is now threatening to release. Warner calls out Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, in arguably more explicit terms than any Democrat has yet, saying he has read the underlying classified material used in the memo and that Nunes misrepresented it as part of a McCarthyite “secret Star Chamber” effort to discredit the FBI probe of the president.
“We’re seeing this coordinated effort to try to impede the investigation,” Warner says. The Nunes memo, which is apparently drawn from information contained in the same late-2017 document dumps that has caused the Senate panel to expand its inquiry, is based on “fabrications” and “connecting dots that don’t connect,” Warner asserts.
The battle continues apace.