Byron York: Scheming, speculation behind scenes as Democrats push intel memo [classified reveal]

This time last week, there was growing tumult in Washington over the memo produced by House Intelligence Committee Republicans alleging "FISA abuse" in the Trump-Russia investigation. There were dire warnings that the release of the GOP memo would endanger national security, that doing so would be "extraordinarily reckless" without proper FBI and Justice Department review, and that the FBI had "grave concerns" about "material omissions of fact" that would "fundamentally impact the memo's accuracy."

The Democratic memo, these Republicans say, is much different. "It's full of sources and methods," said one lawmaker, referring to highly classified information. "It includes material that they clearly cannot release," said another. "It's nothing but sources and methods," said a third. "Even to the footnotes."

The inclusion of all that classified information has Republicans speculating on Democratic strategy. (A Democratic spokesman declined to comment.) One widely held theory is that the memo was intentionally written in a way that the FBI, Justice Department, and White House would have little choice but to recommend extensive redactions.

"Part of what they are going to do is to talk about how the White House redacted their memo and didn't redact the Republican one," said one of the lawmakers quoted above. "Part of the plan was, let's create a document that gets eviscerated in the scrubbing and comes out with a bunch of redactions and they say, look, the White House is hiding something."

Those suspicions were fueled Monday when Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, told reporters, "We want to make sure that the White House does not redact our memo for political purposes, and obviously that's a deep concern."

Sometimes an executive has to choose between the lesser of two evils.

The choice here is:

1) Do damage by releasing sources/methods
2) Do damage by allowing our republic to be materially undermined.

Since we’re talking about folks who tried to prevent the election of a political opponent, we have what the constitution describes as a set of people who are “enemies domestic”.

If the people cannot express their will at the ballot box, the only other way to effect change in government is violent overthrow.

Any players involved in undermining the election as has been done should at least be removed from their government position or at most put in prison.

Trump has to decide what’s more important, sources/methods or the republic itself. I would choose the republic.

What good is source/method protection to the people if it only protects a tyranny that suppresses their will at the ballot box?

That’s what would make the choice easier for me. I’d make a speech describing things as above, blame the democrats for forcing this choice, and release an un-redacted memo.

Choosing to protect sources/methods means the enemies domestic have another day to thwart the will of the people.

Maybe next time, they’ll be successful.

Keep in mind, had Hilary won, we wouldn’t get a whiff of this stuff.

We are lucky to have a chance to stamp this behavior out now. We should take that chance.

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