Spiridon Louis wrote:
chaparral wrote:
So, no there is a huge difference between what the FISA application may have said and what Nunes did. The FBI provided the information the judge needed, Nunes purposefully misled.
You don't know what information the judge needed. Neither Nunes in his memo, nor the FBI in their petition to the court, fully disclosed everything that they knew. It's clear to me that Nunes did it out of partisan politics. I don't know why the FBI did it (and neither do you), but IF (and this is the operative question in this whole thing) they did it in a partisan fashion it's a HUGE FRICKING DEAL. I expect a Congressman to be a slimy political POS. I need to be able to trust that the FBI isn't going to come after me because they don't like my politics. It's bad enough that the IRS did that and nobody gave a damn. I'm certain you're not ok with the FBI being political and even weaponized. Let's be sure they weren't.
I am fine with the IG investigating the FBI, that is there job and adds to my trust of the FBI. I am very concerned if they were acting for political reasons. I am very honest, that would be very dangerous. But Nunes politicizing the intelligence oversight role of his committee is equally dangerous. Following the Church Committee the US implemented a pretty unprecedented oversight system of a countrie's intelligence agencies, seriously the UK and other countries think it is crazy to give politicians that level of oversight, since they were bound to leak it and use it for political purposes. For the next three decades that system has worked pretty well, at least better than any other oversight system. It is heavily based on the intelligence agencies trusting congress to act honestly in the oversight responsibility, and really the intelligence committees have been the most bi partisan and least political committees for the past decades. Now Nunes is breaking that trust, not by going after possible abuse, but by using it as a political weapon. The committee in the past has gone after abuse in the intelligence agencies and it great that they have. You are concerned about the FBI being weaponized, it is equally concerning that Nunes is weaponizing his oversight role. I
If the FBI did do something wrong, Nunes would not have to been purposefully misleading in the memo. He would have stated what they did wrong. He would have stated what was in the memo and why it was not sufficient. He could state why the judge needed that information, but he did not. He did none of those things, he only misled. Why would he need to mislead if he had an actual argument?
Fine, let us ignore all of Nunes previous actions, statements, and known bias. We can imagine that Nunes thinks there is actual wrong doing. What should he do? He should recommend an investigation by the IG of the DOJ, which this is all based on a report by them anyway. Ok, let us say he does not trust them to investigate their own, he could have the IG from somewhere like DNI investigate. If he thinks no other inspector generals can be trusted, the committee itself could investigate. They have a staff, they can issue subpoenas and call witnesses. They could do this in secret to not tip people off. Or they could do the normal joint memo with the minority party, if they can't agree they could release a majority and minority opinion, which is common practice. Since he did none of these, it is obvious he does not care about actually investigating this and wants to score political points. So either there was abuse and he thinks it is more important to score points or there was not abuse and he is just trying to score points.
To sum it up, Nunes is doing this because of political reasons:
1: If there was actual wrong doing, the memo would not need to mislead. It could clearly state why this was abuse.
2: If there is actual wrong doing, releasing a memo is not the way to address wrong doing.
If you want to address those two points, go right ahead.