Would the political class be trying so hard to discredit the Nunes memo if it didn’t terrify them?

There’s getting to be a backlash among certain conservatives, mainly of the #NeverTrump variety, against the idea that there’s really a serious matter to be uncovered in the case of the FISA wiretap application for Carter Page, and in the attempts to cover up the documents related to it.

The thinking goes like this: Paranoid Trump superfans see some sinister deep state conspiracy in everything! Missing text messages! Unreleased memos! These nutcases are so off the rails, they’re convinced they’re going to find something “worse than Watergate”! What fruitcakes.

I’ve been using the term “worse than Watergate” for months in reference to this, and apparently that’s now being turned against me and people like me by those on the right who never liked Trump to begin with and want to remain acceptable in polite society.

Let’s be clear about what “worse than Watergate” means and why it’s been used by me and others: The Watergate scandal was about people associated with the Nixon re-election campaign breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and planting listening devices in the hope they could get some useful information to wield against George McGovern in the 1972 presidential campaign. The commission of a burglary against your presidential opponent so you could plant a listening device is obviously a crime and a massive scandal. The ensuing attempts to Nixon and others to cover it up only made the scandal worse.

Now, let’s fast-forward: We know that in 2016, during the Obama Administration, the FBI applied for a FISA warrant to wiretap Carter Page, who was an official of the Trump presidential campaign. There are multiple indications that the primary evidence presented as probable cause in this application was a dossier prepared by Christopher Steele, who was working for an outfit called Fusion GPS, which was being paid - albeit indirectly - by the Clinton campaign. It also appears that almost all the information in this dossier was unverified, and that much of it was false, and that the FBI made no attempt to verify any of it before using it in the FISA application.

If all this is true, I believe that is worse than Watergate for this reason: While the Nixon campaign used private citizens to commit a crime, and that’s a very bad thing, the scenario laid out above would mean that the Obama Administration, via the Justice Department and specifically the FBI, abused a law enforcement mechanism of the federal government - feeding it false information to obtain...Read More HERE