When the FISA memo was made public Friday after Democrats failed in their efforts to keep it from the American people, it immediately came under attack from those same Democrats and their comrades in the liberal mainstream media. After their claims that the memo would threaten national security were shown — by the memo’s release — to be false, they are now claiming that the memo shows the exact opposite of what it actually does.
The memo shows that, under the Obama administration, the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) abused the FISA process and misled the court to secure a FISA surveillance warrant of Trump associate Carter Page, leading to the creation of the Mueller probe. On Saturday, President Trump tweeted:
This memo totally vindicates “Trump” in probe. But the Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on. Their was no Collusion and there was no Obstruction (the word now used because, after one year of looking endlessly and finding NOTHING, collusion is dead). This is an American disgrace!
Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) responded with a tweet of his own that seems to ignore both the actual text of the memo and the fact that he and other Democrats did all they could to block the memo’s release. His tweet said:
Quite the opposite, Mr. President. The most important fact disclosed in this otherwise shoddy memo was that FBI investigation began July 2016 with your advisor, Papadopoulos, who was secretly discussing stolen Clinton emails with the Russians.
The response to Schiff’s tweet from people who had read the memo for themselves was both immediate and brutal, with the hashtag #FullOfSchiff being born and quickly catching on. In fact, the hashtag (and the phrase) are now being used to describe the type of disconnect many Democrats are demonstrating as they pretend the memo does not say what it says.
CNN — never appearing to be able to pass up an opportunity to attack Trump (with or without any basis in fact) — attacked the president’s tweet in a sarcastic piece entitled “Donald Trump said 4 things that aren’t true in a single 47-word tweet.” The article makes most of its points by taking cheap shots at the president’s typographical and formatting mistakes (putting “Trump” in quotation marks and misspelling “there” as “their”).
The rest of the article is more twisting of the facts and claiming that the Mueller probe has nothing to do with the FISA surveillance warrant for Carter Page. The good folks over at CNN would do well to focus more on getting their facts straight and less on using sarcasm to disguise poor journalism, because if there had never been a FISA warrant allowing the FBI and DOJ to spy on Page, there would likely never have been a “Trump/Russia collusion” investigation to morph into the Mueller probe. That FISA warrant was based on the fake “Trump dossier” to the extent that then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe testified before the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017 that the FISA warrant would not have been approved without citing the information in the “dossier.”
In other words, there is a direct line from the fake “dossier” to the FISA warrant and from the FISA warrant to the Mueller probe. So the memo’s assertion that the warrant was illegitimately obtained (because it was based on fraudulent information) “totally vindicates” the president in the probe.
Getting back to Schiff, this writer reported on the memo when it was released. That article takes the memo, point by point, and includes a link to the full text of the memo. One thing is certain: The memo does not say “the opposite” of Trump’s claim that it “totally vindicates” him in the “Russian Witch Hunt” — because that is exactly what it does. Because the memo — based on reams of intelligence — shows:
1) The warrant that launched the investigation (that later became the Mueller probe) cited the “dossier” but hid from the court the fact that the “dossier” was illegally funded by the DNC and Clinton campaign as “opposition research.”
2) The application for the FISA warrant also extensively cited a Yahoo News article focusing on Page’s 2016 trip to Moscow, claiming that it corroborated the “dossier,” when in reality, the article was based on information from the “dossier” leaked to Yahoo and others by the author of the document, Michael Steele.
3) While using the “dossier” to apply for the FISA surveillance warrant on Page, the FBI and DOJ concealed from the court the fact that Steele and others involved in producing and circulating the “dossier” were ardently anti-Trump and pro-Clinton.
4) At the time that the FBI and DOJ were using the “dossier” to obtain the FISA warrant, the FBI was aware that the “dossier” (which has since been entirely discredited as a work of fiction) was “unverified” and “uncorroborated.”
5) The FISA application mentions George Papadopoulos without mentioning that there is no evidence of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos. At least one of the agents who conducted the Papadopoulos investigation has been shown by text messages and FBI records to have been involved — along with his mistress — in leaking information to the media, protecting Clinton in the investigation into her illegal use of a private e-mail server, and being involved in a discussion with then-Deputy FBI Director McCabe about an “insurance policy” against Trump’s election.
Seeing that this memo “totally vindicates” Trump does not require that one be a Trump fan; it merely requires that one is honest.
But, honesty — it would appear — is not on the agenda. The Washington Post weighed in with an article calling into question whether the surveillance of Page had anything at all to do with the Trump campaign. The “logic” of that claim? Page was no longer a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign when the FISA application was made.
Seriously.
So because Page had left the campaign before the demonstrably fraudulent warrant application to spy on him in relation to allegations of Trump/Russia collusion, it suddenly has nothing to do with the Trump campaign? There does not appear to be any limit to how far the liberal establishment will go in their twisting of facts. Here is a tip for the folks over at the Post: If Page had nothing to do with the campaign, then his alleged actions would not have been part of the investigation into whether or not the campaign was colluding with Russia.
Not only do these claims by Democrats and liberal media ignore the plain text of the memo and the simplest of facts, they pretend that Democrats and liberal media did not move heaven and earth to keep the memo from going public. If — as they now claim — the memo not only does not vindicate Trump, but actually does the opposite, they would have been at the tip of the spear calling for its release. But having failed to keep it away from the American people, it appears they are forced to attempt to spin it to say “quite the opposite” of what it actually says.
