By The Editorial Board I The Wall Street Journal
A Democratic memo written under the
direction of ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff.
Photo:
Daniel Acker/Bloomberg News
Their intel memo confirms the FBI used Clinton research to spy on Carter Page.
The House Intelligence Committee on
Saturday released the long-awaited Democratic response to allegations the FBI
abused its surveillance powers during the 2016 election. Committee Chairman
Devin Nunes owes ranking Democrat Adam Schiff a thank you for assisting his
case.
The 10-page Democratic memo begins
by declaring that “The FBI and DOJ officials did not ‘abuse’ the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process, omit material information, or
subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign.” Yet the facts it lays
out show the opposite.
In particular the memo confirms that
the FBI used an opposition-research document paid for by the Hillary Clinton
campaign and Democratic National Committee as part of its application to
surveil Carter Page, who was associated with the Donald Trump campaign.
Democrats dispute the degree to
which the FBI relied on the dossier created by opposition-researcher
Christopher Steele in applying for its FISA court order, but that’s beside the
point.
If the FBI had as much “compelling evidence” and “probable cause” as
the memo asserts, it would not have needed to cite the Steele document. And the
Democrats do not dispute that the Steele dossier was the FBI’s only source in
its initial FISA application for its allegation that Mr. Page met with suspect
Russians in Moscow in July 2016.
The Democratic memo makes no attempt
to rebut the widely reported news that former Deputy FBI Director Andrew
McCabe told Congress that the FBI would not have sought a surveillance warrant
without the dossier. Democratic Rep. Jim Himes claimed on “Fox News Sunday”
that Mr. McCabe never said that, but then why not put that in the memo?
The Democratic memo also confirms
that the FBI withheld from the court the partisan provenance of the dossier. Democrats even provide, for the first time in public, the
precise language the FBI used in its initial application in a long,
obfuscating footnote.
Democrats say the FBI told the FISA
court that a “law firm” [Clinton/DNC firm Perkins Coie] hired “an identified
U.S. person” [oppo-research firm Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson ] to
“conduct research regarding Candidate #1s ties to Russia.” The “identified U.S.
person” then hired “Source #1” [Mr. Steele] to do the research.
The footnote
ends: “The FBI speculates that the identified U.S. person was likely looking
for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s campaign.”
Speculates? Likely? Could? The
dossier was paid for by actors whose overriding purpose was to defeat Mr. Trump. Nowhere do Democrats say the FBI used the words
“political” or “partisan” or “campaign,” much less Clinton or Democratic
National Committee.
The Democratic memo claims the FBI
acted “appropriately” in not “revealing” the name of an “entity” in a FISA
application, but this is laughable. The FBI sometimes masks identities
to preserve sources and methods, but the Steele dossier was a pastiche of
gossip and rumor based on Mr. Steele’s contacts.
Disclosing his partisan
funders would have betrayed no important intelligence sources but would have
given the court reason to ask the FBI for more credible information before
granting an eavesdrop order.
Messrs. Steele and Simpson briefed
their media friends in September and October about their dossier, despite FBI
prohibitions. The FBI nonetheless falsely
told the court that Mr. Steele wasn’t the source of a Yahoo News article that
it used as additional evidence in its application.
While the Democratic
memo repeatedly refers to Mr. Steele’s reporting as “reliable” and “credible,”
it confirms that the FBI fired Mr. Steele after it found he hadn’t told the
truth about his media spinning.
The Democratic memo devotes
considerable space to smearing the hapless Mr. Page, as if he’s some kind of
master spy and the Rosetta Stone of the Trump-Russia story. Yet no one has
offered proof that he colluded with the Russians, and he hasn’t been indicted.
Democrats also make much of the fact
the FBI started looking into the Trump campaign in July 2016 but didn’t receive
“Steele’s reporting” until “mid-September.” So what? The issue here is the
fairness and honesty of the FISA application in late October (not the
investigation), and what matters is that the FBI didn’t move on the FISA
application until after it received the dossier.
***
The only definitive
evidence of political “collusion” so far is that the Clinton campaign paid Mr.
Steele to troll his Russian sources for dirt on Donald Trump. The FBI then used
this dirt as a reason to spy on Mr. Page and anyone he was communicating with.
Imagine how the press would be playing this story if the roles were reversed?
