FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
‘Schiff Memo’ Shows Democratic Coup-Backers Desperate over Being Caught Red Handed
Feb. 25, 2018 (EIRNS)—Those who have read LaRouche PAC’s dossier “Robert Mueller Is an Amoral Legal Assassin; He Will Do His Job if You Let Him,” and its Feb. 20 update, “The Mueller Dossier Revisited: How the British and Obama Diddled the United States,” will find almost amusing the sophistical contortions contained in the heavily-redacted, 10-page so-called “Schiff Memo” released on Feb. 24 by the House Intelligence Committee Democratic Minority.
The memo purports to “correct the record” vis-å-vis the January memo on FISA court abuse issued by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes. It insists that “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.”
Nunes was on the mark when he characterized the Democratic memo last Saturday as
“clear evidence that the Democrats are not only covering this [FISA court abuse] up, but they’re also colluding with parts of the government to cover this up.”
For example: The Schiff memo piously asserts that the DOJ was upfront with the FISA Court on “the assessed political motivation of those who hired” Steele, and cites as proof the wildly convoluted paragraph included in the DOJ’s FISA applications, which, the Schiff memo writes, contained “generic identifiers that provided the Court with more than sufficient information to understand the political context of Steele’s research.” Only one problem: Neither the cited paragraph—nor the Democratic memo—ever mentions that the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign had hired Steele.
One of the funnier examples of wild-eyed desperation, is the acknowledgment that Steele met with journalist Michael Isikoff in September 2016 and that the FBI/DOJ did submit Isikoff’s subsequent Yahoo! article to the FISA court as “independent” corroboration of the Steele dossier’s claims, but, the Democratic minority writes, there is no “evidence” that Steele briefed Isikoff on his dossier as the Republican majority wrote, “since the British Court filings to which they refer do not address what Steele may have said to Yahoo!”!
Similarly, the memo claims that because the notorious FBI paramours, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, did not sign the FISA application, Strzok being merely one of those involved in the “closely-held investigation” of Trump-Russian collusion, their political bias is irrelevant.
And so on. Nunes has released a useful point-by-point response to each assertion in the Democratic memo, and a one-page summary of its key points. At the Feb. 21-24 Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, he was clear that the fight will escalate: “The point of our memo was for one purpose only, and that was to show that FISA abuse had occurred. To have a secret court that gets abused like this is totally unacceptable.... We have to make sure that people are held accountable so that everyone knows that it’s never going to be okay to take dirt from a foreign actor that was essentially made up out of whole cloth, and then use it against the other candidate, no matter whose candidate that is.”
