The big memo was a bust, accomplishing little other than prompting the preposterous second-place president to declare preposterously that, somehow, amid its utter irrelevance, the memo had “vindicated” him.
I had not known until then that Donald Trump required vindication. He has yet to be accused formally of anything.
To be fair, the vindication reference was in a tweet, and Trump seems to give implausibly less thought to tweets than even his blustery spoken word.
What happened begins with Rep. Devin Nunes, Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a petty, angry man of hyperpartisanship. He got Trump to approve — of course — the public release, over myriad objections, of a summary that Nunes’ staff had written of a mere portion of the Justice Department’s successful request in October 2016 for a FISA surveillance warrant of a man named Carter Page.
Basically, Nunes’ argument was that the FBI sought and got the warrant without telling the FISA court that it was seeking it based on information gathered by a man hired by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
That — Nunes and Trump declared — meant that the entire Justice Department was rottenly pro-Hillary to the core and that the ongoing special counsel investigation into possible Trump ties to Russia and Russia’s interference in our election was a Democratic conspiracy and massively fraudulent.
Actually:
1) The investigation into Russian interference in the election and ties to Trump had begun in July 2016 after the Australian government notified ours that a volunteer foreign policy adviser to Trump’s campaign — a youngster named George Papadopoulos — had told an Australian diplomat in May while lubricating in a London wine bar that the Russians had told him that they had hacked Hillary Clinton’s emails.
2) The Page warrant wasn’t issued until October, after Page had taken leave from the Trump campaign.
3) The FBI did not do a very good job electing Hillary, if that was its purpose, especially after its director, James Comey, dealt Clinton a fatal blow 10 days before the election by reopening — for a few days — the email investigation he’d announced closed months before.
4) The partisan staff-written memo released by Nunes slipped up and included a reference to a footnote in the FISA application indicating that the FBI had told the FISA court that the information it was acting on — at least in part — was a matter of political motivation by the source. That source was Christopher Steele, a former British spy, contracted with by an outfit called Fusion GPS, a private intelligence-gathering firm that Republican opponents of Trump had first contracted with during the primary.
5) A great chunk of intelligence information is gathered from sources who have a bias — indeed, whose very purpose for being a source is that they have a bias. One way you deal with that kind of thing is … you know … check it out. You seek a warrant to do some spying. Page was a curious-enough fellow — an American investment banker working in Moscow who had close Russian contacts and had made speeches in Moscow assailing his great and noble home country for its sanctions against Russia over Russia’s heinous acts toward Ukraine.
6) Any good newspaper reporter can tell you that the best stories often come from sources who have biased and impure motives — but only after what they tell you turns out from your investigatory labor to be factual. The information’s credibility and relevance, once established, trump any less-than-pristine motives in those who provided the tip.
7) The appropriate action if Nunes had been sincere and serious in the offense he’d taken would have been to bring in Justice Department officials to account in closed testimony. But his purpose was pure partisan huffiness and defensiveness — to try to discredit the ongoing Robert Mueller investigation that seems, for some reason, to frighten Trump half to death.
8) The Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee refused to release a rebuttal memo from the Democratic minority, making their partisan heavy-handedness evident — a clumsiness so inept that the committee reversed itself Monday night.
Finally, none of that has anything to do with Mueller’s investigation, which proceeds away from the media and the politicians and with heads down.
The Mueller team will report what it reports when it is ready to report. Then we can read and study and judge.
Trump will be really vindicated at that time, or not.
I’m happy to wait. But the president seems a tad antsy.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.