Remember when the GOP was beside itself with concern that Hillary Clinton, with a personal email server, might have put classified information at risk? Remember when they accused her of treason over the possible - just possible - release of classified information?
Well, explain now how many of these same Republicans are demanding - even threatening - the deliberate release of classified information - in the form of a memo - that both the FBI and the Justice Department have asked the president to disallow. The memo, created by the staff of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., reportedly alleges the FBI abused its surveillance authority when it sought a secret court order to monitor a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page. With the memo, Republicans are pushing a fever-dream narrative that politically biased law enforcement officials set out to sabotage Trump.
The trouble with that GOP assertion is that it disregards myriad unrelated evidence that Russia sought to influence the election and the pattern of contacts between Russians and Trump's associates - over and over: Paul Manafort's non-ending Russian entanglements, a changed GOP platform granting a Russian advantage in Ukraine, Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with Russians in Trump Tower, George Papadopoulos' guilty plea, fired National Security Adviser Mike Flynn's guilty plea, repeated unreported contacts and conflicts with Russians, Trump's own statements to both news reporters and Russian diplomats that he fired former FBI director James Comey because of the Russia probe - and that's just a partial list.
As a matter of political reality, the GOP's drive to release Nunes' memo has everything to do with defending President Trump from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, and the flap about the memo comes at a time when Mueller is zeroing in on details of the president's involvement in explaining his son's arranged meeting with Russians back in Trump Tower in July 2016 to get Russian-offered dirt on Clinton.
The FBI's reaction to the memo's planned release is simple: "[W]e have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo's accuracy," reads a Wednesday FBI statement.
According to The New York Times, people who have read the three-and-a-half-page memo say it contends that FBI and Justice officials were not forthcoming to a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge in seeking the warrant. It says the officials instead relied on a dossier written by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent, without adequately explaining to the judge that Democrats had financed Steele's research.
Of course, before that, Republicans had financed the research. But let's not let facts get in the way of a good GOP fantasy.
Speaking of facts, shedding a few on Carter Page might be helpful, too. He is a former Moscow-based investment banker who, in reality, had been on Justice and FBI authorities' radar for years after Russian operatives tried in 2013 to recruit him.
Page, who founded an investment company in New York called Global Energy Capital, met with one of three Russians who were eventually charged with being undeclared officers in Russia's foreign intelligence service, known as the SVR, according to an April 4, 2017, New York Times report. Court documents in the case - brought by Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan at the time (and later fired by Trump) - say Page provided documents about the energy business to one of the Russians, Victor Podobnyy. The FBI said Page thought Podobnyy was a businessman who could help with brokering deals in Russia.
The court documents say the FBI slipped a listening device into binders passed to the Russians during an energy conference. The device secretly recorded Podobnyy and another Russian operative discussing efforts to recruit Page. Podobnyy calls Page, an enthusiastic "idiot" who frequently flies to Moscow and is interested in earning large sums of money.
"I will feed him empty promises," Podobnyy said, according to the transcript.
Though charged, Podobnyy and the second Russian were protected by diplomatic immunity from arrest and prosecution while in the United States. But a third Russian operative, Evgeny Buryakov, lacked diplomatic immunity and was arrested in 2015. He later pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as an unregistered foreign agent. He was sentenced in 2016 to 30 months in prison.
The FBI interviewed Page in 2013 as part of the investigation, but decided he had not known Podobnyy was a spy. The bureau did not accuse Page of wrongdoing.
But when, in 2016, Page joined the Trump campaign and traveled to Russia in July to deliver a speech to the New Economic School, a Moscow university, the new trip caught the attention of U.S. intelligence agencies. Later that month, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian attempts to influence the presidential election and to examine whether any of Trump's associates were involved in that effort. Page was preparing to return to Russia in December when investigators obtained the FISA warrant in October 2016.
Who, with all the known counterintelligence investigations already started, would not think this deserved a closer look?
Republicans - namely House Speaker Paul Ryan - can insist all day long that their push to release this "secret memo" is merely to question the conduct of the FBI and the Justice Department in the early stages of the Russia investigation, not an attempt to undermine the special counsel.
If you believe that, we have 100 acres in the middle of the Olgiati Bridge to sell you.