7 Deceptions Inside Democrats’ Rebuttal of GOP FISA Memo
by Aaron Klein
24 Feb 2018

NEW YORK — Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee on Saturday released a purported rebuttal to a four-page House Republican memo from earlier this month that alleges abuse of surveillance authority on the part of Obama-era federal agencies.

The Democratic rebuttal contains misleading claims, omits key details, and, perhaps unintentionally, actually proves the FBI and Department of Justice utilized the infamous, largely discredited 35-page anti-Trump dossier to obtain a FISA court warrant to monitor an individual formerly associated with Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Here are seven key problems with the claims made inside the Democrats’ rebuttal memo.

1 – The House Democratic rebuttal opens with a seemingly deceptive statement that Steele’s dossier “did not inform” the FBI’s decision to start its investigation into Trump’s campaign in late July.

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2 – While perhaps not intending to, the Democratic memo actually confirms that the Obama Justice Department did use Steele’s largely discredited dossier for FISA court applications to monitor Page.

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3 – The rebuttal leaves out key information that may dispute the Democratic document’s claim that the FISA warrant was “not used to spy on Trump or his campaign.”

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4 – The rebuttal tries to give legitimacy to the possibly illicit surveillance of Page by noting that two of the presiding federal judges were appointed by President George W. Bush and one by President Ronald Reagan.

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5 – The Democratic memo raises immediate questions about the possible use of a second dossier authored by Cody Shearer, a shadowy former tabloid journalist who has long been closely associated with various Clinton scandals.

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6 – While trying to argue otherwise, the Democratic rebuttal actually confirms the key contention in the Republican memo that the FBI and DOJ failed to inform the FISA court that Steele’s dossier was funded by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) via the Perkins Coie law firm.

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7 – The Democratic rebuttal omitted key details about the FBI’s internal assessments of Steele and his reporting.


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Written with research by Joshua Klein.

http://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2018/...-gop-fisa-memo/