Nunes quickly returned fire, accusing the FBI - headed by President's Trump appointee, Christopher A. Wray - of having "Stonewalled Congress' demands for information." The memo may reportedly be released soon.
There are legitimate concerns about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the myriad means - not all requiring warrants - by which law enforcement gets access to private conversations involving U.S. citizens.
The fervor around the memo means that these serious policy debates will follow so many others into the maw of Trump-driven partisanship and that the broader questions of how our national security state operates - questions more about legal and institutional design than the motives of individual FBI agents - will go unexamined.
Among many, many other glaring defects, it requires the inexplicable complicity of far too many people, many of them Republicans appointed by Trump, within the FBI and the national security division of the Justice Department, as well as the credulous acquiescence of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, whose bench is wholly populated by judges placed there by the George W. Bush-appointed chief justice, John G. Roberts Jr. On the narrower question of whether the wiretap order targeting Page had a solid basis, the memo is unlikely to provide the public with much clarity, either.
The memo's core contentions are reportedly that FBI officials relied too heavily on a now-infamous dossier compiled by British former intelligence officer Christopher Steele without adequately corroborating its claims and failed to disclose to the FISA court that Steele's research had been underwritten by Democrats in the market for political opposition research.
Typically, FISA applications are fairly substantial documents, with supporting affidavits running dozens of pages, minutely fact-checked by government lawyers after making it through a labyrinth of internal approvals within the FBI. It matters whether Steele's dossier constituted the heart of the case presented to the FISA court or was more like supplementary material.
Which, of course, they never are: No FISA application has ever been made public, and vanishingly few targets of FISA surveillance ever even learn of the spying.
From its inception in 1979 through 2002, the court never turned down a single wiretap application - a sign, intelligence agencies assured us, of the rigorous approval process before reaching the court, rather than the willingness of its judges to act as rubber stamps.
The court also saw fit to "Modify" a striking 310 applications before approving surveillance.
It seems unlikely that the conflict over the Nunes memo will, in the end, amount to much more than a proxy war over the legitimacy of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's probe of the Trump campaign.
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/nuness-memo-stunt-surveillance-does-need-more-scrutiny
There are legitimate concerns about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the myriad means - not all requiring warrants - by which law enforcement gets access to private conversations involving U.S. citizens.
The fervor around the memo means that these serious policy debates will follow so many others into the maw of Trump-driven partisanship and that the broader questions of how our national security state operates - questions more about legal and institutional design than the motives of individual FBI agents - will go unexamined.
Among many, many other glaring defects, it requires the inexplicable complicity of far too many people, many of them Republicans appointed by Trump, within the FBI and the national security division of the Justice Department, as well as the credulous acquiescence of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, whose bench is wholly populated by judges placed there by the George W. Bush-appointed chief justice, John G. Roberts Jr. On the narrower question of whether the wiretap order targeting Page had a solid basis, the memo is unlikely to provide the public with much clarity, either.
The memo's core contentions are reportedly that FBI officials relied too heavily on a now-infamous dossier compiled by British former intelligence officer Christopher Steele without adequately corroborating its claims and failed to disclose to the FISA court that Steele's research had been underwritten by Democrats in the market for political opposition research.
Typically, FISA applications are fairly substantial documents, with supporting affidavits running dozens of pages, minutely fact-checked by government lawyers after making it through a labyrinth of internal approvals within the FBI. It matters whether Steele's dossier constituted the heart of the case presented to the FISA court or was more like supplementary material.
Which, of course, they never are: No FISA application has ever been made public, and vanishingly few targets of FISA surveillance ever even learn of the spying.
From its inception in 1979 through 2002, the court never turned down a single wiretap application - a sign, intelligence agencies assured us, of the rigorous approval process before reaching the court, rather than the willingness of its judges to act as rubber stamps.
The court also saw fit to "Modify" a striking 310 applications before approving surveillance.
It seems unlikely that the conflict over the Nunes memo will, in the end, amount to much more than a proxy war over the legitimacy of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's probe of the Trump campaign.
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/nuness-memo-stunt-surveillance-does-need-more-scrutiny
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