One-sided Nunes memo lacks context Declassified document is not 'the biggest political scandal in American history': Our view

The Editorial Board | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Nunes memo: FBI, Justice Department abused surveillance The controversial Nunes memo is out. It claims the FBI and the Justice Department abused their surveillance authority on Trump's 2016 Presidential campaign. Democrats say the memo is misleading.

Americans might be forgiven their bafflement over all the Washington hubbub flowing from Friday's release of a three-and-a-half page memo by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee.

The document suggests darkly sinister Justice Department machinations behind obtaining a 2016 wiretap of Carter Page, a former Trump campaign official. Fox News personality Sean Hannity, an arch defender of President Trump, feverishly characterized it in advance as making "Watergate like stealing a Snickers bar."

Well, no. This is, in reality, relatively small-bore stuff that intensely focuses on the evidence used (or withheld) by the FBI and the Justice Department in persuading a judge to grant the Page wiretap.

OPPOSING VIEW: Nunes memo exposes abuse of power

While the memo raises some potentially troubling questions about FBI conduct, there's clearly a whole other side that the public should be allowed to see before drawing conclusions. Without that context, it's hard to see this one-sided document as anything other than a political hit job meant to muddy the waters around special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election.

With that investigation gathering speed — already yielding two indictments and two guilty pleas involving four former Trump campaign officials — this memo helps the president with a time-honored defense: prosecuting the prosecutors in the court of public opinion. One of the key targets is the Justice Department official who oversees the inquiry and played an ancillary role in the Page wiretap, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

Rosenstein, whom Trump nominated to his current post, is now in the White House crosshairs because, under department rules, only he can fire Mueller, and only for cause. (Rosenstein's boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, recused himself last year because of his own involvement in meeting with Russians while working in Trump's campaign.) With Rosenstein out of the way, Trump could choose a more pliable replacement to constrain or fire Mueller and upend a probe threatening his presidency.

Yet even House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said Thursday that “this (Nunes memo) does not implicate the Mueller investigation. This does not implicate the (deputy attorney general).”

FBI leaders say the suddenly famous memo is a deeply flawed document. In a highly unusual move Wednesday, the bureau issued a terse statement expressing "grave concerns" about its release and essentially accusing Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes' aides, who wrote the memo, of cherry-picking facts to reach a conclusion.

The White House blew aside these concerns in agreeing to declassify the memo, which states that, in persuading a judge on the super-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to give them the Page wiretap in 2016, FBI officials relied — at least in part — on information from an explosive dossier written by a respected former British spy, Christopher Steele. According to the memo, the judge was not informed that Steele had been hired to write the dossier as part of opposition research funded by Hillary Clinton's campaign, or that Steele had made clear to Justice officials that he's not a fan of Trump.

All of that is disconcerting, if true. But it doesn't say what other information investigators had when they sought the wiretap or what the FBI's obligations are in cases such as these. Some of that context might be in a separate Democratic memo that the committee has refused to release. Let's see it.

The FBI isn't beyond reproach, and there's an inspector general investigation underway that should offer fair-minded analysis of the bureau's shortcomings in handling not only the Russian/Trump probe but also the October-surprise reopening of the Clinton email investigation.

For now, this memo is hardly what the hyperventilating Hannity said would be "the biggest political scandal in American history." To the extent there's a scandal here, it is the weaponizing of sensitive intelligence information into one-sided censure.

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