Sen. McCain has the best words
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on Friday summed up the vastly overrated Nunes memo.
He tweeted: "The latest attacks on the FBI and Department of Justice serve no American interests - no party's, no president's, only Putin's."
Of course, that was just the snippet lifted for Twitter from McCain's longer and more complete reaction.
"The American people deserve to know all of the facts surrounding Russia's ongoing efforts to subvert our democracy, which is why Special Counsel Mueller's investigation must proceed unimpeded. Our nation's elected officials, including the president, must stop looking at this investigation through the warped lens of politics and manufacturing partisan sideshows. If we continue to undermine our own rule of law, we are doing Putin's job for him."
The Nunes backfire
Interestingly, the Nunes memo - aimed to tarnish the probe's legitimacy by pushing a narrative that surveillance abuses by the FBI against Vladimir Putin fan Carter Page were fanned by the Steele dossier and kicked off the whole Russia investigation - actually seems to show just the opposite.
Two sentences near the end of the memo go like this: "The Page FISA application also mentions information regarding fellow Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, but there is no evidence of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos. The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016 "
The Washington Post notes that Democrats seized on the passage that confirms for the first time that it was Papadopoulos, not Page, that set the FBI's counterintelligence investigation in motion. Papadopoulos in October became the first person to plead guilty in Mueller's probe, and he is now a cooperating witness.
The Papadopoulos passage shows that the Russia investigation would be underway with or without the surveillance of Page, and - more critically - even if the government had never seen a dossier of information about Trump that was compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British spy whose research was funded first by a Republican candidate then by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Furthermore, Papadopoulous came to the attention of authorities not thanks to FISA or Steele. Rather, intelligence agents from a second U.S. ally, Australia, told American authorities about a drunken conversation Papadopoulos carried on with an Australian diplomat in a London bar in May 2016. Papadopoulos bragged that he'd been told the Russians had emails that would be damaging to Clinton.
"The authors of the GOP memo would like the country to believe that the investigation began with Christopher Steele and the dossier, and if they can just discredit Mr. Steele, they can make the whole investigation go away regardless of the Russians' interference in our election or the role of the Trump campaign in that interference," Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee wrote in response to the Nunes memo. "This ignores the inconvenient fact that the investigation did not begin with, or arise from Christopher Steele or the dossier, and that the investigation would persist on the basis of wholly independent evidence had Christopher Steele never entered the picture," the Democrats added.
By the way, Papadopoulos is not mentioned anywhere in the 16 reports that make up the Steele dossier.
And the Russians feel the love
Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin keeps laughing. Again, we quote Sen. John McCain.
"In 2016, the Russian government engaged in an elaborate plot to interfere in an American election and undermine our democracy. Russia employed the same tactics it has used to influence elections around the world, from France and Germany to Ukraine, Montenegro, and beyond. Putin's regime launched cyberattacks and spread disinformation with the goal of sowing chaos and weakening faith in our institutions. And while we have no evidence that these efforts affected the outcome of our election, I fear they succeeded in fueling political discord and dividing us from one another."
What do we have to show for American security, resistance, retaliation or payback nearly two years later?
Nothing.
Nothing save a president and GOP intent on ignoring it.
Trump praises Putin, calls the meddling "a hoax" and blatantly ignores a bipartisan law that he establish new sanctions against the country that conducted cyberattacks on us and most certainly will do so again in 2018. And the cowed GOP condones it.
On Monday, just ahead of the deadline for imposing sanctions, Trump's State Department announced it would not impose the sanctions Congress overwhelmingly passed in mid-2017. A State Department official said there is no need for new sanctions "because the legislation is, in fact, serving as a deterrent."
Huh? For starters, the bill that passed the Senate last summer 98-2 and passed by the House 419-3 was titled "Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act." It was intended to punish, not deter. Secondly, just hours before the State Department said there would be no sanctions, CIA Director Mike Pompeo said that Russia hadn't really scaled back its election interference efforts. In fact, Pompeo said: "I have every expectation that they will continue to try" to meddle in U.S. elections.
But wait, there's more. On Friday, Bloomberg reported that a U.S. Treasury Department report now warns that Russia's sovereign debt market "is too important to sanction" without risking global financial turmoil. Bloomberg termed the announcement a "signal" that the Trump administration is wary of targeting Russia for penalties.
Trump's Russia "hoax" is on us.