The House Intelligence Committee voted today to release the four-page memo that sums up FBI and Department of Justice abuses relating to the Steele dossier, the Obama administration’s FISA applications, and improper spying on the Trump campaign by the Obama administration.
It appears that the memo’s contents are as has been rumored:
South Carolina GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy, who helped write the four-page memo, said Sunday he wants it made public.
He also suggested the memo indeed addresses whether the FBI relied at least in part on the dossier — paid for partially by Democrats and the Clinton campaign during the 2016 presidential election — to apply to a secret federal court to get a surveillance warrant, purportedly on then-Trump adviser Carter Page.
“If you … want to know whether or not the dossier was used in court proceedings, whether or not it was vetted before it was used. … If you are interested in who paid for the dossier … then, yes, you’ll want the memo to come out,” Gowdy told “Fox News Sunday.”
You can also judge the memo’s contents from the remarks of arch-Democrat Adam Schiff:
“Today this committee voted to put the president’s personal interests, perhaps their own political interests, above the
Democratic Party’snational interests,” the Democrat said.
President Trump has five days in which he can block the memo’s release. I don’t know why he would want to do that.
More good news: Andrew McCabe, Deputy Director of the FBI, resigned today. Better late than never:
Andrew G. McCabe abruptly stepped down on Monday as the F.B.I.’s deputy director after months of withering criticism from President Trump, telling friends he felt pressure from the head of the bureau to leave, according to two people close to Mr. McCabe.
If that is true, it is the most tangible contribution that Christopher Wray has made as FBI Director. The New York Times, in the linked article, says that Wray had expressed concerns about the forthcoming Inspector General’s report “examining the actions of Mr. McCabe and other senior F.B.I. officials during the 2016 presidential campaign, when the bureau was investigating both Hillary Clinton’s email use and the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia.”
The Times manages to report on McCabe’s ouster without mentioning that Democratic Party activists in the FBI apparently held meetings in McCabe’s office, where they talked about the 2016 election and whether Donald Trump could or should be blocked from winning. Hence, Peter Strzok’s famous text in August 2016:
I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office – that there’s no way he gets elected – but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.
Is is long overdue for political activists like Andrew McCabe to depart from the FBI. As I have written many times, Barack Obama’s politicization of the Department of Justice, including the FBI, is perhaps the worst scandal of his administration.
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