A report last night from the NY Times suggests that the Republican memo – assuming they mean the Nunes memo – will reveal that Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein renewed surveillance on Carter Page shortly after he came into office because he thought Page might be a Russian agent:

NY TIMES – A secret, highly contentious Republican memo reveals that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein approved an application to extend surveillance of a former Trump campaign associate shortly after taking office last spring, according to three people familiar with it. The renewal shows that the Justice Department under President Trump saw reason to believe that the associate, Carter Page, was acting as a Russian agent… The memo’s primary contention is that F.B.I. and Justice Department officials failed to adequately explain to an intelligence court judge in initially seeking a warrant for surveillance of Mr. Page that they were relying in part on research by an investigator, Christopher Steele, that had been financed by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. A handful of senior Justice Department officials can approve an application to the secret surveillance court, but in practice that responsibility often falls to the deputy attorney general. No information has publicly emerged that the Justice Department or the F.B.I. did anything improper while seeking the surveillance warrant involving Mr. Page.

The original surveillance began in 2016 under the Obama administration and was apparently based on the DNC-financed unsubstantiated dossier by Christopher Steele.







If this reporting is accurate, the renewal of Page’s surveillance by Rosenstein and the original spying done by the Obama administration based on the phony dossier will be one of the big reveals of the memo. The memo is being said to accuse the Obama administration of abusing the FISA courts to spy on members of the Trump campaign.

It’s worth nothing in the NY Times report that this isn’t the first time Page came unders surveillance:

Mr. Page, a former Moscow-based investment banker who later founded an investment company in New York, had been on the F.B.I.’s radar for years. In 2013, an investigation revealed that a Russian spy had tried to recruit him. Mr. Page was never charged with any wrongdoing, and he denied that he would ever have cooperated with Russian intelligence officials. But a trip Mr. Page took to Russia in July 2016 while working on Mr. Trump’s campaign caught the bureau’s attention again, and American law enforcement officials began conducting surveillance on him in the fall of 2016, shortly after he left the campaign. It is unclear what they learned about Mr. Page between then and when they sought the order’s renewal roughly six months later. It is also unknown whether the surveillance court granted the extension.

The House Intel Committee has convened a 5pm meeting today and the expectation is that they may vote in that meeting to release the memo: