Senators raise serious questions that should trouble all Americans

St. Louis Post-Dispatch ^ | February 16, 2018 | Marc A. Theissen, Washington Post Columnist

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After House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., sent his memo laying out potential abuses of the FISA process by the FBI to the White House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., demanded that he be removed as chairman. Nunes was “deliberately dishonest” in pushing to release a “bogus memo,” Pelosi declared, and had “disgraced the House Intelligence Committee” with his “partisan effort to distort intelligence.”

But Democrats can’t so easily dismiss the far more detailed declassified criminal referral written by two respected Republican senators — Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, and Lindsey O. Graham, R-S.C. — which confirms the claims raised in the Nunes memo. The Grassley-Graham memo has been all but ignored since its release, but it deserves attention from everyone — and answers from the Justice Department.

If you’re concerned about Russia meddling in our election, as every American should be, then you should be deeply concerned about unverified allegations by Russian government officials, passed on to the FBI by a paid partisan of one candidate, leading to a warrant to spy on an American citizen associated with the other campaign.

According to Grassley and Graham, that is precisely what happened. The FBI “relied heavily” on the Steele dossier to obtain warrants for surveillance of Carter Page, a marginal former Trump campaign adviser, the senators write. Moreover, they say, the FBI did not have “meaningful corroboration” of Steele’s claims when it submitted its application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court. “The bulk of the application consists of allegations against Page that were disclosed to the FBI by Mr. Steele and are also outlined in the Steele dossier. The application appears to contain no additional information corroborating the dossier allegations against Mr. Page” except for “a news article that appears to be sourced to Mr. Steele’s dossier as well.”

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I do not know if it was in the print copy, but the article is on the Washington Post web site.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/theres-another-memo-on-the-russia-investigation-this-one-demands-answers/2018/02/13/e9ae626c-10df-11e8-9570-29c9830535e5_story.html?utm_term=.e95ad1ca8579

[a little elbow grease]

From Conservative Treehouse comments section:

MakeAmericaGreat says:

March 16, 2018 at 12:13 am

As Sundance says, it’s not clear that Grassley will get a different answer than the one Sessions already gave on the same subject.

So why is Grassley asking?

Because now we are on offense and running our own propaganda campaign. Now we are building our own case, creating a groundswell, doing our own drip-drip-drip.

This is how you do it. It’s been a brilliant, patient process. As much as we want justice done yesterday, it doesn’t work like that. You have to slowly build up your army’s forces. And that’s what has been done, all this time, as Sundance has pointed out over and over again.

We’re getting closer. Still a ways to go, but we’re moving closer every day.

The immediate goal is the 2018 midterms, as well as neutralizing any threat to Trump (they go together, those two things). No reason to rush the matters as we want to have the last word on “scandals” before the midterms.