On January 30, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee approved the release of a memo written by Devin Nunes staffer Kashyap “Kash” Patel. The memo is released on February 2.
Former Nunes deputy chief of staff Damon Nelson and another former staffer named Andrew House also contributed to the memo.
The Nunes / Kashyap memo alleges, without evidence, that top officials at the Department of Justice and the FBI lied about the source of the intel they used to justify a FISA warrant to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in October 2016.
The committee’s ranking member, Adam Schiff, called the decision to release the memo “transparently cynical and destructive” in a tweet on Monday night. The Department of Justice’s top congressional liaison, Stephen Boyd, told Nunes in a letter last week that publicly releasing the memo would be “extraordinarily reckless” and urged him to consult with the Department—and, if need be, with its Inspector General—before disclosing it.
The Atlantic
The memo, formally titled “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” is later proven to be false. The source that Nunes claims was hidden or whitewashed in the FISA request was actually described in an anecdote that takes up more than half a page.
When President Trump declassified a memo by House Republicans in February that portrayed the surveillance of a former campaign adviser as scandalous, his motivation was clear: to give congressional allies and conservative commentators another avenue to paint the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian election interference as tainted from the start.
The New York Times, 2018
The memo, which consumed Washington for weeks, was widely dismissed as a biased argument of cherry-picked facts. But it galvanized President Trump’s allies and made Mr. Patel a hero among them.
The New York Times, 2019
Sources
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-were-the-democrats-so-worried-about-the-nunes-memo
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-sought-release-of-classified-russia-memo-putting-him-at-odds-with-justice-department/2018/01/27/a00f2a4c-02bb-11e8-9d31-d72cf78dbeee_story.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/22/us/politics/how-a-trump-decision-revealed-a-gop-memos-shaky-foundation.html
https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-make-carter-page-fisa-applications
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/the-men-behind-the-nunes-memo/551825/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/us/politics/kash-patel-ukraine.html
https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-make-carter-page-fisa-applications
Photo: Gage Skidmore
