TPM: The Nunes Memo Is Even Weaker Than Expected (includes: Text of Memo)

[kpete]

@joshtpm
Buried lede: Could a President who got spun up by Hannity and co to think this Memo was Mueller Kryptonite also be putty in the hands of foreign spies? ¯_(ツ _/¯

Link to tweet

First Take: The ‘Nunes Memo’ Is Even Weaker Than Expected
By Josh Marshall | February 2, 2018 1:30 pm

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At the end of the day, even a cursory read of the memo makes it sound like a cherry-picked effort to discredit the FISA warrant on Carter Page by focusing on one piece of evidence from the application while conspicuously going out of its way to discuss any of the other evidence. The memo also seems to rely heavily on the reader not knowing much about how warrant applications, particularly FISA warrant applications, work


Through the couple weeks this memo has been a source of controversy, critics of the document have argued that the memo shouldn’t be released without releasing the underlying materials it was based on. This seems like a pretty clear way of saying that it’s highly misleading without knowing what other evidence the FBI had on Page. Again, really obvious. What we have here is a memo going to town on the Dossier in ways that seems significantly misleading but not altogether inaccurate and making that the heart of not only the Page FISA application but the whole Russia probe while conspicuously refusing to discuss the other evidence it contained. Even the most basic read makes this obvious.

Here’s the text of the Memo itself. The limited annotations are ones I made myself in the course of reading.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/first-take-the-nunes-memo-is-even-weaker-than-expected