7 Deceptions Inside Democrats’ Rebuttal of GOP FISA Memo

NEW YORK — Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee on Saturday released a purported rebuttal to a four-page House Republican memo from earlier this month that alleges abuse of surveillance authority on the part of Obama-era federal agencies.

The Democratic rebuttal contains misleading claims, omits key details, and, perhaps unintentionally, actually proves the FBI and Department of Justice utilized the infamous, largely discredited 35-page anti-Trump dossier to obtain a FISA court warrant to monitor an individual formerly associated with Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Here are seven key problems with the claims made inside the Democrats’ rebuttal memo.

1 – The House Democratic rebuttal opens with a seemingly deceptive statement that Steele’s dossier “did not inform” the FBI’s decision to start its investigation into Trump’s campaign in late July.

This is the first contention in the rebuttal, which relates it is trying to “correct the record.” However, the Republican memo did not assert that the dossier informed the FBI’s decision to launch its investigation in late July or anytime. Instead, the GOP memo documented that Steele’s dossier formed an “essential part” of the FISA court applications submitted by Obama-era federal agencies to monitor the communications of Carter Page, who briefly served as a volunteer foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Meanwhile, even though House Democrats seem to be rebutting a contention that was not made in the Republican memo, there are possible issues with the rebuttal’s claim that the FBI’s investigative team only received Steele’s “reporting” in mid-September, ostensibly referring to the written dossier. The Democrats entirely ignore that last July, Steele reportedly traveled to Rome, where he met with an FBI contact to supply the agency with alleged information he found during the course of his anti-Trump work. The Washington Post reported that Steele met with the FBI on July 5, 2016. The Democratic memo reveals that the DOJ “accurately informed the court that that the FBI initiated its counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016.” That is 26 days after Steele met with the FBI in Rome.

2 – While perhaps not intending to, the Democratic memo actually confirms that the Obama Justice Department did use Steele’s largely discredited dossier for FISA court applications to monitor Page.


The memo contains a sentence stating that “as DOJ informed the court in subsequent renewals”; but the rest of that sentence is redacted. The next sentence states that “Steele’s reporting about Page’s Moscow meeting,” with the remainder of that sentence also redacted. The next sentence states that...Read More HERE