Saturday, February 24, 2018

For the Record: First Impressions on the Schiff Memo



As you know, the Democratic minority of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence prepared a response mostly drafted by Rep. Schiff of California to the Republican majority's memo or Nunes Memo released unredacted and against strong objections from the intelligence community on February 2, but President Trump objected to the publication of the response until an unclassified version could be prepared.

That's out this afternoon, and I found myself live-tweeting some initial reactions, and thought I'd lay that out here in slightly better organized format than the one you'll see on Twitter proper, before smarter people get around to commenting on the thing:






Papadopoulos wasn't interviewed by the FBI until after the inauguration, January 2017, but of course they knew about him from late July 2016, the same time as the DNC emails were getting published by WikiLeaks, when the Australian High Commissioner to the Court of St. James suddenly remembered that odd conversation about emails by the thousand. An impression I'm getting is that Comey leading the investigation was unwilling to really investigate anybody who was on the Trump campaign staff; he only opened up the request for a warrant on Carter Page after Page quit the campaign in late September, and we can assume that he similarly started to process of getting Manafort under surveillance when Manafort resigned at the end of August, which would therefore be connected with what's blacked out here. Perhaps Papadopoulos stayed on the Trump payroll until the inauguration and that's why he wasn't interviewed until after that.

Actually that's probably wrong; the memo says that this material independent of Steele got into the renewal applications on the FISA order on Page (starting January 2017), not the initial application, so that the original application must have been missing that, though it did have all the material FBI had collected on Page from 2013 through March 2016, when they interviewed him on matters related to the campaign, and something that happened between that and Page's trip to Moscow, which is blacked out in the redacted text, plus the Steele stories from the Moscow trip itself. (Not a word as far as I can see on Page's presence in all the interaction with Ambassador Kislyak at the Cleveland Convention in late July, though we know, I think, that's one of the things he lied about publicly.) If the Steele information was, then, any part of the reason for requesting the FISA warrant on Page, the central thing was the fact that he'd just quit the campaign, allowing Comey to treat him as fair game like Manafort in July.


Especially pleased with that little bit of detective work. Eat your heart out, Marcy! (Update: Marcy not only notes this, but emphasizes what it implies, that Page must have been talking about the Russian capture of emails while the FBI was surveilling him, and they learned something useful from it.)
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