Democratic Response To Nunes Memo Released

Without further ado, here's the link (pdf) to the Democrats' response to the Nunes/ Republican memo which smeared the FBI's and Justice Department's roles in investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election. The 10- page memo was significantly redacted.

Here's a quick overview:

In their now-public retort, Democrats charge that the GOP unfairly attempted to malign the FBI and the Justice Department for including information from the author of a now-famous dossier alleging President Trump had ties to Russian officials in an application to surveil Carter Page, one of Trump’s former campaign advisers. [snip] 

But according to the Democrats’ memo, Page’s Russia ties had already captured the attention of federal law enforcement agencies. The FBI interviewed Page about his “Russian intelligence contacts” in March of 2016, the memo states — the same month he was named as a Trump campaign adviser, and months before Steele as hired to conduct research on Trump or first made contact with the FBI. 

The court was also told that Steele had been approached by a “U.S. person” who had been hired “to conduct research regarding Candidate #1’s ties to Russia,” according to a portion of the surveillance applications contained in the Democrats’ memo. 

“The FBI speculates that the U.S. person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit candidate 1’s campaign,” the application says.

Any fair reading of the Democratic memo makes it clear Republicans were desperate to give the impression of impropriety in the way information was presented to the FISA court to get surveillance warrants. It also gives the lie to Republican attempts to identify the "Steele dossier" as the impetus for the FISA application.

Let's see how the facts play out in the media -- whether the information is conveyed without a "he said/ she said" spin that gives the impression that "both sides" have equally valid positions, or have been equally honest in their presentation of "facts."

(Ed. note:  if the report on tonight's "NBC Nightly News" is any indication, Democrats lost this round; they gave Nunes a couple of one-liners, quoted a Trump tweet, and gave Democratic Reps. Jackie Speier and Adam Schiff barely a word explaining what the Democrats were rebutting. Maybe they should turn over their communication rapid response to the Florida high school massacre survivors. "Democracy dies in darkness" my ass.)