Adam Schiff 'took the bait' with FISA memo, ex-House Intel investigator says

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff "Took the bait" with the Democratic rebuttal to a Republican memo on alleged surveillance abuses by the Justice Department and FBI, according to a former investigator on the panel.

While we were quietly running that process ... on our side of the investigation, we wanted to make sure that memo was bulletproof. So all we put in the memo were excerpts from people's under oath interviews and information that we gleaned from the FBI and DOJ's own documents."

It found that British ex-spy Christopher Steele's anti-Trump dossier formed an essential part of the initial and all three renewal FISA applications against Page; former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe testified that no FISA warrant would have been sought from the FISA court without the Steele dossier information; the political origins of the Steele dossier were known to senior DOJ and FBI officials but excluded from the FISA applications; and DOJ official Bruce Ohr met with Steele beginning in the summer of 2016 and relayed to the DOJ information about Steele's bias.

As Patel would tell it, Schiff "Took the bait and put in so much more information in his memo than we did in ours because we knew we would be able to use that information later and prove how wrong they were. It would just take a little bit of time. So that was the strategy behind it."

Patel explained why the sheer amount of information the Democrats released in their memo could be turned against them.

DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz issued a report in December 2019 largely vindicating the "Nunes memo," criticizing the Justice Department and the FBI for at least 17 "Significant errors and omissions" related to the FISA warrants against Page, for concealing potentially exculpatory information from the FISA court related to denials by a number of Trump associates, and for the bureau's reliance on the discredited Steele dossier, which played a "Central and essential" role in the FBI's decision seeking electronic surveillance.

FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who has since left the bureau, admitted to Durham in the summer that he falsified a document during the bureau's efforts to renew its FISA authority to wiretap Page, editing a CIA email in 2017 to state that Page was "Not a source." Page has denied any wrongdoing and was never charged with a crime.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/adam-schiff-fisa-memo-bait-house-intelligence-committee-investigator