Friday Talking Points (470) -- No Smoke, No Gun

[ChrisWeigant]

Happy Nunes Memo Day, everyone!

Today, of course, was supposed to be the day when the memo from House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes caused the skies to split and the F.B.I. building to spontaneously implode in upon itself, leaving nothing left but a mysterious rift to some dark and deep otherworld. Bob Mueller was also supposed to make a public announcement that his entire investigation was nothing short of a sham (secretly directed by Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and George Soros), and that he would be shutting down his office just as soon as all the documents could be shredded and the hard drives erased.

None of that, obviously, happened. Instead, the reaction in Washington was pretty incredulous: "That's all you got? Seriously?" The memo was a dud. The rightwing news media had been drooling over the prospects of this memo for weeks now (Sean Hannity claimed the memo "makes Watergate like stealing a Snickers bar from a drug store," and predicted it would be "the biggest political scandal in American history" ), but a clear indication of the incredible weakness of the memo was the timing Nunes chose for its release: on the Friday just before Super Bowl weekend. That's not when you release a bombshell story, in other words; that's when you release stuff you are embarrassed about.

The memo itself doesn't prove anything. It insinuates a lot, but it doesn't even do that particularly well. It not only doesn't prove its case, it doesn't even do a very good job of making that case. The entire argument boils down to: there was bias in a document used to get a FISA court warrant to tap the phone of Carter Page. That's really it. There's no sweeping case that the F.B.I. is institutionally biased against Donald Trump, there's no case that any of the information collected in the investigation is wrong in any way, there's no case that anything illegal or even unethical took place. To put it in a timely way: the Nunes memo poked its head up, saw its own shadow, and we're all in for six more weeks (months?) of the Mueller investigation.

The only real thing the memo accomplished is to cause everyone to wonder exactly how bad the information from Carter Page is going to turn out to be (if this is an attempt to discredit any such intelligence which was gathered after the warrant was approved). What did Carter get caught saying on his phone? The only other thing it accomplished was to royally piss off the entire F.B.I., which is always a smart move for a president currently under investigation, right?

Here's how one Washington Post article summed this up:

But what does Page have to do with the rest of the Trump/Russia story and the investigation into it? Does Page have anything to do with Paul Manafort's alleged money laundering? Does he have anything to do with Russia reaching out to Papadopoulos? Does he have anything to do with Russia hacking into Democratic email systems to aid the Trump campaign? Does he have anything to do with Michael Flynn's contacts with the Russian ambassador, about which he lied to the F.B.I.? Does he have anything to do with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Manafort meeting with a group of Kremlin-connected Russians to obtain dirt on Hillary Clinton? Does he have anything to do with President Trump firing James B. Comey, which Trump himself admitted was done for the purpose of hindering the Russia investigation? Does he have anything to do with all the other ways Trump may have obstructed justice?

The answer to all those questions is no. Page is a peripheral figure at best. Even if the memo did depict what it sets out to depict about the surveillance of Page, it wouldn't change a thing about the overall Russia scandal. But the memo doesn't even do that.

The one thing Trump really wanted the memo to accomplish was to give him political cover for firing either Rod Rosenstein or Bob Mueller. Whether he does so or not will likely depend on the reaction over at Fox (State) News, one assumes. But if he turns to any other news channel, people are going to be engaged in one big collective yawn. There just is no smoke, and there is no gun.

The other thing the memo did manage to all but bury in the news was official notice that the Trump White House will not be imposing any new Russia sanctions, even though Congress voted almost unanimously to do so. Strange how reluctant Trump is to levy sanctions on Russia, isn't it?

What with all the memo frenzy, it's pretty easy to forget that this was also the week of Trump's first official State Of The Union speech. Granted, it was a pretty forgettable speech, but even so, that's pretty remarkable. In normal times, a State Of The Union speech dominates the news for at least a week, but Trump agreed to let the dud of a memo stomp all over his speech coverage. And in the "life provides perfect metaphors" category, congressional Republicans headed to a retreat after Trump's big speech, and what made the news was the trainwreck that happened along the way.

As for the speech itself, we offered up our own snap reactions to it on Tuesday, if you're interested. Being a Trump speech, so many people were attempting to fact-check it in real time that PolitiFact's website crashed. An after-the-fact fact check (as it were) came up with over a dozen false or misleading statements.

Being a Trump speech, Trump had to lie about his audience size after it was over. Trump claimed his ratings were the "best ever," which wasn't even close to being true (Trump got 45.6 million viewers, far fewer than speeches by the past three presidents, and not even close to Bill Clinton's 1993 record of 66.9 million viewers). This even led Fox News to tweet out evidence that Trump was delusional on crowd size, once again.

Trump's speech also essentially set a new Republican Party policy that they just weren't even going to pretend to do any "minority outreach" any more. One particular line of the speech was appreciated by none other than David Duke, who tweeted in response: "Thank you President Trump. Americans are 'Dreamers' too."

In other GOP minority outreach (with a clenched fist) news, Republicans in Minnesota are apparently terrified that Muslims will be "infiltrating" their party caucuses. Looks like they're way out in front of Trump's call to demonize minorities! No "big tent" here, folks....

One tactic for suppressing minority votes is in danger of being thrown out by a judge down in Florida, as well. Seems the Republicans have been (gasp!) abusing their power to keep their political opponents down. What a surprise! Here's the whole sordid story:

In his opinion, Judge Mark Walker of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida noted that in the four years before {Republican Governor Rick} Scott took office, 154,000 people had their rights restored. But since Scott was sworn in, fewer than 3,000 people had their voting rights restored since 2011.

Walker, who was appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama in 2012, said that as it currently exists, the board has absolute discretion over whether to restore voting rights.

"Florida's Executive Clemency Board has, by rule, unfettered discretion in restoring voting rights. 'We can do whatever we want,' the Governor said at one clemency hearing," Walker wrote in his scathing opinion. "In Florida, elected, partisan officials have extraordinary authority to grant or withhold the right to vote from hundreds of thousands of people without any constraints, guidelines, or standards. The question now is whether such a system passes constitutional muster. It does not."

Walker found that Florida's system violated the First Amendment protections on freedom of expression and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. He noted that the board restored voting rights to those who expressed conservative views, while those who expressed views disagreeing with the board members did not. Walker pointed to an example when the board asked a white man about an illegal vote he had cast, but restored his voting rights after he told Scott the vote had been for him. Walker noted the board denied restoring voting rights to five other former felons -- four of whom were black -- for casting illegal ballots.

"If a state cannot disenfranchise for arbitrary reasons, a state cannot disenfranchise convicted felons in a manner repugnant to the First Amendment," he wrote. "A state cannot yank the right to vote from a Republican felon but retain voting rights for Democratic felons."

"If any one of these citizens wishes to earn back their fundamental right to vote, they must plod through a gauntlet of constitutionally infirm hurdles. No more."

The article further notes that of the 6.1 million people disenfranchised for a felony conviction, more than one-forth live in Florida. Also, that one-in-five African-Americans in the state cannot vote because of this situation. The judge hasn't yet ruled on what should happen next, but it bears watching because of the importance of Florida to electoral politics.

A few other stories from this week are worth mentioning before we get to the awards. Two prominent Republicans in the House have decided not to run for re-election: Representatives Trey Gowdy and Rodney Frelinghuysen. We wrote about Frelinghuysen last Friday, in Talking Point number 5, because the Democrats had finally decided to field a challenger this year. This was the congressional district that Michael Moore made infamous when he tried to run a ficus tree for Congress in his The Awful Truth television show. Frelinghuysen's seat was so safe, Democrats didn't even try to take him down, but now that he's got a solid challenger, he decides to retire. More vindication for Michael Moore, it seems.

The Republicans' fundraiser-in-chief had to abruptly step down, as accusations of sexual misconduct arose around casino bigwig Steve Wynn. Meanwhile, one Republican is reportedly stepping up, as Mitt Romney has now almost-officially announced he'll be running to take retiring Utah Senator Orrin Hatch's place in the Senate.

The man the Trump White House had planned to nominate to be our ambassador to South Korea was yanked from consideration after it was revealed that he did not agree with the administration war hawks who have deluded themselves into thinking that America could attack North Korea and not suffer any sort of retaliation. He even wrote an opinion piece denouncing the idea of a so-called "bloody nose" attack, which pretty much signaled that he's withdrawing from consideration for the job.

Let's see, what else? The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau continues to be defanged and destroyed from within, as Mick Mulvaney stripped enforcement powers from an office within the Bureau who "previously used its powers to force payouts in several prominent cases, including settlements from lenders it alleged had systematically charged minorities higher interest rates than they had for whites." What a surprise, eh?

Although the Trump White House promised the website for petitions from the public would be up and running again in January, they quietly missed their deadline for doing so.

And finally, some welcome news from the world of sports. We wrote about our own disgust on this subject years ago, so we are very glad to see that the Cleveland Indians will be (kinda-sorta) permanently retiring their incredibly offensive and racist "Chief Wahoo" logo from their uniforms. Major League Baseball won't allow them to sell any Chief Wahoo merchandise on their web site, although the Indians will still sell such memorabilia at the ballpark. Even so, this is welcome news, since this was the worst example of racism left in modern American sports (next on the list would have to be the Washington football team's name, but one step at a time...).





Joe Kennedy III gave the official Democratic response to the State Of The Union speech this week, and he deserves at least an Honorable Mention for his performance. The speech was fair-to-middlin', Kennedy's delivery was heartfelt, and he certainly didn't embarrass himself or his famous last name Tuesday night. For some bizarre reason, some people focused on his lip balm, but if that's the only thing people are making fun of then it must have been a pretty decent speech.

But this week our Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week was Representative Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee (the one Devin Nunes chairs, in other words). Throughout the past year, Schiff has been the Democratic voice on the committee which is supposedly investigating Russian meddling in our elections. He has tirelessly pointed out the incredibly partisan nature of how this investigation is being run, and by default he became the person to deliver the Democratic response to the Nunes memo.

He did so in an impressive way. Rather than just going on the airwaves and complaining about Nunes, Schiff put together his own memo -- a rebuttal of the Nunes memo. Point by point, the Schiff memo reportedly undermines all the insinuations in the Nunes memo and tells the full story (or, at least, the Democratic side of the story).

By creating such a document, Schiff made it obvious what sheer hypocrisy it was for Republicans to swear up and down they were releasing the Nunes memo in the name of "transparency." If they want to be transparent, there's now an easy way to do so -- release both memos simultaneously. Nunes (and, by extension, Paul Ryan) have refused to do so. This makes it painfully obvious to the public what a partisan ploy the entire exercise has always been.

This wouldn't have been possible (or it wouldn't have been anywhere near as effective) without Schiff creating a memo of his own. Schiff saw the opportunity, and he rose to it. Tactically, this was exactly the right thing to do.

By providing a counterargument both in detail (contained within the memo itself) and at a gut level ("Release the Schiff memo!" ), Adam Schiff knocked it out of the park politically. Which is why he's a pretty easy pick for Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week this week.

{Congratulate Representative Adam Schiff on his House contact page, to let him know you appreciate his efforts.}





There were plenty of people disappointed in Hillary Clinton this week, for not firing a man accused of sexual misconduct in her 2008 campaign. Her initial response when the story broke was decidedly weak, and then she came back with a longer, more specific explanation which she released 15 minutes before Trump's State Of The Union speech (her own version of "take out the trash day," in other words). But we simply can't get all that excited about Hillary these days, so we'll just give her a (Dis-)Honorable Mention and quickly move on.

Instead, the Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week is a man who just announced he won't be running for re-election this year. Pennsylvania's Robert A. Brady has served 11 terms in the U.S. House, but got caught in a scandal paying off a political opponent. Here are the details:

In October, two of Brady's consultants -- Donald Jones and Ken Smukler -- were indicted in a probe of a $90,000 payment that Brady's 2012 campaign made to challenger Jimmie Moore. The F.B.I.'s probe ensnared Brady himself, though the congressman professed his innocence, even after Jones pleaded guilty last month to making false statements about the payoff.

Brady, who never faced a serious challenge in a seat gerrymandered to elect a Democrat, was already facing opposition on his left. Nina Ahmad, a Philadelphia deputy mayor and progressive activist, launched a primary challenge in November, telling the Philadelphia Inquirer that "we haven't had a progressive voice here from this region" and that after decades of being represented by Brady, "people are ready for a change."

Seriously, when you've got a "seat gerrymandered to elect a Democrat," and when you've been in Congress for two decades, do you really need to pay off challengers to get them to drop out of the race? That's pretty sad, when you think about it.

So while he won't be on the ballot this year for a progressive to defeat, the reason why he's stepping down is more than enough to award him this week's Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week.

{Contact Representative Robert Brady on his House contact page, to let him know what you think of his actions.}




Volume 470 (2/2/18)

From time to time, we don't even attempt to create our own talking points, since they have already been adequately provided by others. Today, we're turning over the entire Talking Points section to three responses to the Nunes memo. One is personally directed at Nunes. One is directed at the partisan process and the damage it has done to our government. Both of these, mind you, are from staunch Republicans, so they cannot be seen as "partisan attacks" in any way, shape, or form. Then to give equal time, our final excerpt is the official Democratic response to the Nunes memo, reproduced in full.

The first of these reactions was admittedly pretty personal. Now, if this had come from a Democrat, we probably wouldn't have even included it, because it would just be seen as partisan spin -- attacking the messenger, as it were.

But this commentary doesn't come from a Democrat, it comes from a Tea Party Republican. Joe Walsh wrote the most scathing takedown of Devin Nunes we've yet read, which paints the picture of a man always willing to put party above country (and just about anything else). So here are some talking points (emphasis added) about who Devin Nunes is, from a hardcore Tea Partier.

I served in Congress with Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). Based on my experience working with him, nothing about the way he's behaving now as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence -- overseeing part of the so-called Russia-Trump investigation -- is particularly shocking.

The Nunes I knew was a purely partisan animal. When it comes to exercising good judgment and discharging his duties in service of the Constitution, he's just not up to the task.

He saw everything through a Republican vs. Democrat lens. In weekly conference meetings for Republican House members, Nunes was always one of then-Speaker John A. Boehner's or Majority Leader Eric Cantor's go-to lieutenants, willing to tout the party line and make sure the rest of us lined up like obedient boys and girls. During my brief tenure, I was one of the more outspoken tea party members, regularly at odds with leadership when it came to budget or government-funding legislation. I still vividly recall Nunes lambasting us as obstinate obstructionists on many occasions, trying to bend us to leadership's will on votes that went against our principles. With Nunes, I found it was all about politics, almost never about policy.

. . .

The congressional intelligence committees traditionally function as some of the least partisan committees -- as they should. Oversight for security threats to this country is too great a responsibility to let committee business devolve into finger-pointing and score-settling along party lines, but that's exactly where the level of discourse has gone under Nunes's "leadership." He's not searching for truth, he's running interference for the White House, abdicating his role as a member of a coequal branch of government, dragging his fellow committee members down with him and exposing House leadership as ineffectual and foolish.

. . .

If Nunes's investigation and memo are about transparency, if he and the president have confidence in their case, then the committee should release the memo, with Nunes's version of events -- and the Democrats' memo, with their version of events -- at the same time. To the extent they can do this without disclosing classified sources and methods, they should release the underlying intelligence both memos are based on. Hell, at this point, they should release the FISA warrant the memo apparently alludes to. If they don't, Nunes and anyone who backs him should be ashamed.

Hoo boy. And that's from a Tea Partier, mind you. Next up is a scion of the Establishment Republicans (even though he constantly tries to portray himself as a "maverick" ), Senator John McCain. McCain also didn't mince words, but his beef is with the process. After all, it wasn't all that long ago that Republicans were tearing their hair out over the prospect that Hillary Clinton had emails with classified information on an unsecured server, and now they're actively putting out classified information to the public even when the Department of Justice and the F.B.I. strongly advised against such an action.

McCain laid out his case for how flawed and nakedly partisan the memo's release was (again, emphasis added):

In a statement shortly before the memo's release, McCain didn't pull any punches.

"In 2016, the Russian government engaged in an elaborate plot to interfere in an American election and undermine our democracy," McCain said. "Russia employed the same tactics it has used to influence elections around the world, from France and Germany to Ukraine, Montenegro and beyond."

McCain said Russia's interference has, at best, sown political discord and succeeded in "dividing us from each other." Attacking the intelligence community is not how to fix the discord, he said.

Ahead of its impending releases, the FBI took the extraordinary step of issuing a public statement to express its "grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo's accuracy."

"The latest attacks against the FBI and Department of Justice serve no American interests -- no party's, no President's, only Putin's," McCain added. "The American people deserve to know all the facts surrounding Russia's ongoing efforts to subvert our democracy, which is why Special Counsel Mueller's investigation must proceed unimpeded. Our nation's elected officials, including the president, must stop looking at this investigation through the lens of politics and manufacturing political sideshows. If we continue to undermine our own rule of law, we are doing Putin's job for him."

And finally, we end with the full text of the response from Democrats. Call us lazy stenographers if you will, but really just about any sentence or paragraph from the following would make a dandy talking point for just about any Democrat in the future. And, absent the Schiff memo, this is the best response to the Nunes memo that has so far been made public. We considered editing it down, but decided in the end to just reproduce the entire response in full, for such a serious matter. So here is the official Democratic response to the Nunes memo, without any added emphasis or commentary:

Chairman Nunes' decision, supported by House Speaker Ryan and Republican Members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, to publicly release misleading allegations against the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation is a shameful effort to discredit these institutions, undermine the Special Counsel's ongoing investigation, and undercut congressional probes. Furthermore, their refusal to allow release of a comprehensive response memorandum prepared by Committee Democrats is a transparent effort to suppress the full truth.

As the DOJ emphasized to Chairman Nunes, the decision to employ an obscure and never before used House rule to release classified information without DOJ and FBI vetting was "extraordinarily reckless." The selective release and politicization of classified information sets a terrible precedent and will do long-term damage to the Intelligence Community and our law enforcement agencies. If potential intelligence sources know that their identities might be compromised when political winds arise, those sources of vital information will simply dry up, at great cost to our national security.

The Republican document mischaracterizes highly sensitive classified information that few Members of Congress have seen, and which Chairman Nunes himself chose not to review. It fails to provide vital context and information contained in DOJ's FISA application and renewals, and ignores why and how the FBI initiated, and the Special Counsel has continued, its counterintelligence investigation into Russia's election interference and links to the Trump campaign. The sole purpose of the Republican document is to circle the wagons around the White House and insulate the President. Tellingly, when asked whether the Republican staff who wrote the memo had coordinated its drafting with the White House, the Chairman refused to answer.

The premise of the Nunes memo is that the FBI and DOJ corruptly sought a FISA warrant on a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, Carter Page, and deliberately misled the court as part of a systematic abuse of the FISA process. As the Minority memo makes clear, none of this is true. The FBI had good reason to be concerned about Carter Page and would have been derelict in its responsibility to protect the country had it not sought a FISA warrant.

In order to understand the context in which the FBI sought a FISA warrant for Carter Page, it is necessary to understand how the investigation began, what other information the FBI had about Russia's efforts to interfere with our election, and what the FBI knew about Carter Page prior to making application to the court -- including Carter Page's previous interactions with Russian intelligence operatives. This is set out in the Democratic response which the GOP so far refuses to make public.

The authors of the GOP memo would like the country to believe that the investigation began with Christopher Steele and the dossier, and if they can just discredit Mr. Steele, they can make the whole investigation go away regardless of the Russians' interference in our election or the role of the Trump campaign in that interference. This ignores the inconvenient fact that the investigation did not begin with, or arise from Christopher Steele or the dossier, and that the investigation would persist on the basis of wholly independent evidence had Christopher Steele never entered the picture.

The DOJ appropriately provided the court with a comprehensive explanation of Russia's election interference, including evidence that Russian agents courted another Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos. As we know from Papadopoulos' guilty plea, Russian agents disclosed to Papadopoulos their possession of stolen Clinton emails and interest in a relationship with the campaign. In claiming that there is "no evidence of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos," the Majority deliberately misstates the reason why DOJ specifically explained Russia's role in courting Papadopoulos and the context in which to evaluate Russian approaches to Page.

The Majority suggests that the FBI failed to alert the court as to Mr. Steele's potential political motivations or the political motivations of those who hired him, but this is not accurate. The GOP memo also claims that a Yahoo News article was used to corroborate Steele, but this is not at all why the article was referenced. These are but a few of the serious mischaracterizations of the FISA application. There are many more set out in the Democratic response, which we will again be seeking a vote to release publicly on Monday, February 5th. Unlike Committee Republicans, however, we will ask the relevant agencies to propose any necessary redactions to protect any sources and methods not already disclosed by Chairman Nunes' document.

It is telling that Chairman Nunes put out this memo without bothering to read the underlying materials, and that he ordered changes to the document without informing his own committee members. It is a terrible lapse in leadership that Speaker Ryan failed to intervene and prevent the abuse of classified materials in this way. It is tragic, if all too predictable, that this President would allow the release of the memo despite FBI and DOJ's expressions of "grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the {Republicans'} memo's accuracy". But most destructive of all may be the announcement by Chairman Nunes that he has placed the FBI and DOJ under investigation, impugning and impairing the work of the dedicated professionals trying to keep our country safe.

Chris Weigant blogs at: ChrisWeigant.com
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Full archives of FTP columns: FridayTalkingPoints.com
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