Anyone recall the Democrat’s House Intelligence Committee Memo – the one that was going to destroy the validity of the Nunes Memo.
House Democrats, led by Adam Schiff, were in such a hurry they wanted to bypass House protocol – applied to the Nunes Memo – and simply release their Memo at the same time.
Committee Republicans JUST voted to declassify their spin “memo” and prohibit release of the Democratic response in what they claimed was “the interests of full transparency.” It was transparent alright – transparently cynical and destructive.
— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) January 30, 2018
Of course Schiff was lying.
What actually happened was all Republican House Intelligence members voted to release the Dem’s Memo – first internally to all House members on January 29, 2018 – and then publicly on February 5, 2018, pending clearance by the White House.
Exactly the same path and timeline the Nunes Memo followed – except that every single Democrat voted against release of the Nunes Memo.
The difference was the Democrats’ Memo was purposefully stacked with classified information – making it impossible to be cleared for release by the White House as it was written.
A source who read the FISA rebuttal memo said that it is filled with sources and methods taken from the original documents. The source argued that this was done to strategically force the White House to either deny release of the memo or substantially redact it, so that Democrats could accuse the White House of making redactions for political reasons.
Adam Schiff himself would later confirm this:
We need to go through that and identify that which remains classified and would implicate sources and methods or investigative interests.
There was just one problem.
The Nunes Memo was released on February 2, 2018.
The Grassley Memo was released on February 6, 2018.
The Grassley Memo was even more damning than the Nunes Memo – and provided more detail regarding Steele’s lack of credibility.
The White House – based on DOJ recommendations – asked for certain redactions to the Democrat’s Memo on February 9, 2018.
Although the president is inclined to declassify the February 5th Memorandum, because the Memorandum contains numerous properly classified and especially sensitive passages, he is unable to do so at this time.
Given the public interest in transparency in these unprecedented circumstances, the President has directed that Justice Department personnel be available to give technical assistance to the Committee, should the Committee wish to revise the February 5th Memorandum to mitigate the risks identified by the Department.
The President encourages the Committee to undertake these efforts. The Executive Branch stands ready to review any subsequent draft of the February 5th Memorandum for declassification at the earliest opportunity.
The changes could have been made by House Democrats in a day – probably less.
As Devin Nunes noted:
Their memo is sitting at the House Intelligence Committee down at the bottom of the Capitol waiting to be redacted. If they really wanted to get it out they’d be down there all day yesterday redacting it, getting it back over to the White House so that the public could know what’s in it.
Instead – crickets…
Again, the problem was the Grassley Memo.
It was so packed with damning information regarding the credibility of Steele – and the FBI – that it utterly superseded the Democrat’s Memo.
Kim Strassel summed up the Grassley Memo in a series of tweets:
1) Why isn’t the (mostly) unredacted Grassley memo front page news? Here’s why: Because it confirms the Nunes memo and blows up the Schiff talking points (which the media ran with).
2) It is confirmation that the FBI’s FISA application relied on the dossier and a news article, and worse, on the credibility of a source in the employ of the Clinton campaign.
3) It is proof that the FBI did not tell the Court the extraordinarily partisan provenance of the dossier.
4) It provides evidence that the FBI presented the FISA Court with materially false evidence, in the claim that Steele had not talked to the press. And then shows that even after Steele admitted under oath that he had, the FBI did not tell the FISA Court in its renewal.
5) It provides evidence that Steele was getting information from the Clinton team itself! Via the State Department! So now, not only do we have a dossier based on unnamed shady Russians, but on Sidney Blumenthal. How much of this was engineered by the Clinton campaign from start?
The Grassley Memo rendered the Democrats’ Memo worthless.
As a result, Schiff no longer wants his Memo to be released.
Here’s why – because the Grassley/Graham referral letter came out and provided detail the Dems assumed wouldn’t be made public when they wrote their memo, and that info crushes their claims that the dossier was validated and Steele was unimpeachable. They don’t want it out.
— Jason Beale (@jabeale) February 16, 2018
If the Democrats – and Adam Schiff – really wanted their Memo to be released, we would have seen it no later than February 12, 2018 – the Monday after the White House referred it back for editing.
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