The Most Important Thing About the Nunes Memo Is What Trump Does Next
On Friday, the long-awaited, much-hyped memo from Republican congressman Devin Nunes was released to the public over the objections of Democrats and the FBI and with the approval of Donald Trump. This four-page document purports to show what it describes as "a troubling breakdown of legal processes established to protect American people from abuses related to the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] process." The basic idea is that the FBI relied on shaky information from a dossier funded by Democrats to get a warrant to spy on former Trump foreign-policy adviser Carter Page, and during that process concealed the document's partisan origins from a secret surveillance court.
Democrats have accused Republicans behind the memo of cherry-picking information and trying to discredit the entire Russia investigation by casting aspersions on a single warrant. And there are certainly a number of ways to attack the memo's credibility. It's not clear if the information the FBI had from the dossier was wrong (the memo doesn't make any claims about that). Bias on behalf of the dossier's author may not have mattered in a court setting. It's unclear how important that dossier info was relative to other factors, though the memo states that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said the FBI wouldn't have sought a warrant without information from the dossier. (The Daily Beast has sources that dispute that bit.) The memo itself admits basically concedes that larger Russia investigation began because of information spilled to an Australian official by another Trump associate, not Page. The monitoring of Page began after he had left the Trump campaign under a cloud of suspicion regarding his Russia connections, so any claims that that surveillance him was an attempt to target Trump seem off. After all, the FBI was aware of Page's (rather blundering) contact with Russian spies back in 2013 and monitored that contact in 2014. At the very least, it's impossible to judge the memo's claims (or the claims of the not-yet-released memo from the Democrats attacking the Nunes memo) without knowing more about the FISA warrant application—which is extremely classified information.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pamybm/the-most-important-thing-about-the-nunes-memo-is-what-trump-does-next
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to play golf? 
