Huckabee Notices 1 Thing That Puts FISA Memo in Perspective
Before the FISA memo was released last Friday, the media tried to portray it as a grave threat to national security. When it was released, they began to refer to it as an example of the dreaded nothingburger.
The Republicans had overpromised and underproduced, the media line seemed to be. Never mind that it revealed that the unverified Trump dossier, which investigators knew was compiled by anti-Trump forces, was used to obtain a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act against a member of the Donald Trump campaign.
Never mind that it laid out all of the times at which the FBI ought to have known the dossier was unreliable and tainted by bias, yet had no problem using it in a court that was set up specifically to prevent American citizens from being spied on by the government for spurious reasons.
It was a dud. Nothing to see here. Let’s move on to the Super Bowl, or perhaps that big stock market drop!
For anyone who was paying attention, mind you, the memo was a pretty big deal. It threw back the curtain on weaponized intelligence being used against a candidate for the presidency for political reasons. While we had heard whispers of what was in the memo before, what it revealed had yet to be put forth in such detail.
At that level, the media’s relative silence about the memo was telling. Mike Huckabee — former Arkansas governor and former presidential contender, as well as father of the current White House press secretary — may have put it into perspective best in a post on Facebook.
“I lived through Pentagon Papers and Watergate, Iran Contra and Whitewater and more but 1st time in my life seeing Press trying to keep lid on govt actions rather than fully expose,” Huckabee wrote on Monday.
“They hate Donald Trump THAT much. More than they love truth. Sad. Journalism is dead.”
Facebook users agreed.
“There is not integrity in the press. They write the news to fit their agenda. Telling the truth is not in their makeup,” one user wrote. “I am saddened.”
“I don’t think what is written in the press can be called journalism any longer,” another said.
“It is sad to say you are right, but you are,” another noted, saying that the media hate the president “because they can not control him.”
Huckabee’s post was a timely one, considering it came on a day where the Senate Judiciary Committee released a document stating that members of Hillary Clinton’s inner circle and the Obama State Department fed information about Trump to Steele during the investigation.
According to the Washington Examiner, the controversy involves an additional memo written by Steele for the dossier that was not included in what was released to the public by BuzzFeed in January 2017.
“Steele wrote the additional memo based on anti-Trump information that originated with a foreign source,” the Examiner wrote.
The memo was part of a criminal referral from Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., asking the Justice Department to investigate Steele.
“In a convoluted scheme outlined in the referral, the foreign source gave the information to an unnamed associate of Hillary and Bill Clinton, who then gave the information to an unnamed official in the Obama State Department, who then gave the information to Steele. Steele wrote a report based on the information, but the redacted version of the referral does not say what Steele did with the report after that.”
Fox News reports Grassley and Graham passed on a criminal referral to the Justice Department in early January, alleging Steele either violated 18 USC 1001 by lying about his contacts to the media when interviewed by the FBI or that he was misrepresented by the bureau.
So, just so we’re clear, the man who assembled the dossier that was used to obtain a FISA warrant on a member of a presidential campaign could now face charges himself. But nope, nothing to see here. Just keep looking away.
No wonder Americans are so frustrated with the media.
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