Political Forums - Its Official

Just to set the backdrop for all this, here's a viewpoint from Mark Penn, Dem pollster and political strategist (who you guys probably hate because he had the audacity to suggest to the Dems during the last election cycle that they should try to be more "centrist"):

I have no idea what is in this memo, but it’s a memo. It’s speech. It’s from the very staff and people our Constitution assigns to oversee the Justice Department and the FBI. And the elected officials who wrote it think I should see it. The people who don’t want me to see it are the elected officials and leaders of the Democratic Party, the institutions and individuals whose actions are being reviewed, and several of the same newspapers that went to court to publish the “Pentagon Papers.”

Penn also does a nice job setting up the release of the memo. It really is worth reading to see the ground that's been covered on this topic. For example:

Let’s remember what has been found and disclosed about what was going on at the FBI. Andrew McCabe made crucial decisions related to these investigations and, yet, his wife received more than $500,000 in contributions for a state senate race from Terry McAuliffe, a Clinton confidante. McCabe stepped down from the FBI this week.

FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page traded 50,000 texts detailing unprecedented bias for and against the subjects of investigations and discussed an “insurance policy” should Trump get elected. They were removed from the investigation and are under investigation by the inspector general of the Justice Department.

So it’s a fact that six senior leaders of the FBI or Justice Department have been either reassigned or fired based on facts that have come out largely from the work of this committee and of the inspector general of the Justice Department. Yet, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) is being branded almost as a lunatic.

So, leading up to the release of the memo, folks within the FBI had already started to react. McCabe gets out of Dodge, Strzok is sidelined, and the Justice Dept had already started to investigate. Those actions supported what we started hearing on the Sunday shows this past weekend what might be in the memo.

Now comes the interesting details. These include:

The "Dossier" was used as a basis for obtaining a FISA warrant, and also for renewing that FISA warrant.
The Carter Page FISA warrant application required certification from either then-FBI Director James Comey or then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe. (McCabe is now gone...hmmmmm).
The FBI and Justice knew the "Dossier" was not intel, and was bought and paid for by political operatives, but they used it anyway.
The FBI knew Steele had "skin in the game" - he had personal dislike for Trump and didn't want to see Trump elected.
Private citizens were spied upon by individuals within the federal law enforecement apparatus who appear to have manipulated the legal system to enable their activities
The major media (including WaPo, NYT and others) was played, big time. The problem likely was the media wanted to beleive what they were being told so they decided not to be too curious about it.

Also, remember when the media had a fit about Trump's tweet that the Obama admin spied on this campaign? Well, at least according to the memo, on October 21, 2016, the Justice Department and the FBI “sought and received” a FISA probable cause order authorizing “electronic surveillance” on Carter Page from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. At the time, Page was a volunteer advisor on the Trump campaign.

So, if this is true, a bogus "Dossier" was presented to a Federal judge by the Obama Justice Dept as the basis to obtain a FISA warrant to surveil a member of Trump's campaign. A private citizen was spied on by the Federal government.

Some of you have been going on and on for over a year now about how Trump conspired with the Russians. I've never believed ANY of this, and have stated so a number of times here, and I've been called all kinds of names, had my intelligence questions, and have been referred to as a Russian "comrade".

I say this not because the reason of this memo is somehow "vindication". I say this because I hope some of you - who have urged me to "wake up" - well, wake up. This is your government, at the highest levels, involved in this abuse. You've not wanted to believe that something like this could be possible. I've simply believed and have stated we've not had all the facts, that the facts we've been presented with are highly dubious, and the the facts as presented just don't add up.

Do the facts presented today add up? I ask you: what makes more sense? Does it make more sense that a US presidential candidate would conspire with a foreign power to win an election? Or does it make more sense that partisans within government with access to the right tools and processes might try to manipulate the law and its processes? To me, the latter is far more believable, and in fact, not unprecedented.

We now have some competing information that stands in stark contrast to what's been reported so far. We'll see what happens, but I suspect that some folks whose names we really didn't know a year ago - and maybe one or two that we had heard of - are going to be required to answer some pretty tough questions about their actions.