> “Steele admitted to Ohr his feelings against then-candidate Trump when Steele said he 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.’”
So is his sense of 'desperation' a result of political differences, or as a result of his findings?
It shows his bias, which is a clear conflict of interest, and something that at the very least should have been disclosed to the FISC for their consideration for the warrant.
The fact that it was not disclosed shows that either the leadership of the FBI was overzealous or also very biased.
Legally, if there is even an apparent conflict of interest, an FBI officer is supposed to recuse.
"It shows his bias, which is a clear conflict of interest, and something that at the very least should have been disclosed to the FISC for their consideration for the warrant.
"
Actually no, legally, it has no impact or relevance.
The same way that whether a prosecutor likes or hates you doesn't matter to a warrant application.
It matters whether they have probable cause or not.
If they have probable cause, there is no malicious prosecution claim you can make.
Judge is supposed to look at the evidence, see if there is evidence of probable cause, and if so, approve it.
Otherwise, deny it.
Either that happened or it didn't.
Either all the relevant (and again, bias is not relevant) evidence supporting the warrant were provided or it wasn't.
The judge is the neutral adjudicator, not the investigator.
There is a lot of caselaw on this because bias of informants is always challenged (and pretty much always loses):
"Legally, if there is even an apparent conflict of interest, an FBI officer is supposed to recuse."
This is not correct AFAIK.
There is no legal statute or local court rules i'm aware of saying any such thing.
If you know one, please cite it.
(I used to be very heavily into this area when i interned at the Center for Democracy and Technology many years ago).
The FBI is only driven by the attorney general's guidelines, which are not overseen or approved by anyone else, and carry no force of law.
In this case, the judges were not shown the evidence. This is the weakness of courts - they can only rule on what is presented to them.
Again, an FBI officer is supposed to recuse if there is even the appearance of a conflict of interest. That's the legal standard. So, obviously biased FBI officials should not have been involved in preparing or approving the FISA warrant application.
"In this case, the judges were not shown the evidence. "
What evidence, precisely, do you think? As all the caselaw i cited says, bias is not evidence. The standard for probable cause is not very high.
Fun fact: it's also not legally actionable, even if evidence was hidden, if it's likely the warrant would have been approved anyway.
"Again, an FBI officer is supposed to recuse if there is even the appearance of a conflict of interest. That's the legal standard. "
Please cite actual caselaw instead of bare assertions.
I'm aware of no caselaw that says this, and i'm a lawyer with a significant amount of knowledge about FISA warrants and FBI guidelines/rules.
The only regulations here are internal to the FBI (though published in the CFR i believe), which are not "a legal standard" and are 100% irrelevant to what they need to do in front of a court.
(also note that there is a separate set of FBI guidelines that are classified that cover certain types of investigations. I do not remember if they cover the investigation type that occurred here)
Let's not forget that this memo was voted to be released by republicans, the democratic one was voted down. Take politics into consideration when reviewing the memo.
In this case, he was a witness. The FBI selectively disclosed the available information they had from him and about him to the FISC in a way to bias the court's decision.
How would you like the FBI to make a similar case about you or your favorite politician to the FISC? The FBI is there to protect our rights, not infringe on them.
Many of the FBI officials who had approval authority had at least an apparent conflict of interest and should have recused.
If sources and informants had to meet the same standard as FBI officers, we wouldn't have very many sources or informants. There's an expectation that people outside law enforcement aren't going to meet the standards of law enforcement.
That said, I'm not an expert in these matters, and I'm looking forward to the rebuttal memo to see what the other viewpoint is.
That's disingenuous. They haven't prevented the eventual release of it. What they've prevented is circumventing the rules of the oversight committee which have a series of events (committee vote, wider vote, review, etc) prior to a public release.
Rep Adam Schiff not doing his homework soon enough for it to be released in tandem with the Republican memo is his fault. They're not stopping it, they're just requiring he follow the same rules.
How ingenuous of you is it not to suggest that the Republican memo wait so that both can be released at the same time. Also, its true that there are Republicans on the committee that don't want to see the Dem's memo released at all!
> How ingenuous of you is it not to suggest that the Republican memo wait so that both can be released at the same time.
There's no rule that all memos on a subject need be released at the same time. Each is released once it completes the release process. If there's a "rebuttal memo" from the Republicans upon the contents of the Democrat's memo, should we wait for that as well? How about the rebuttal to the rebuttal?
The only requirement is that the vote and review process is followed.
> Also, its true that there are Republicans on the committee that don't want to see the Dem's memo released at all!
The comment to which I responded claimed that "Republicans have prohibited the release of the minority memo" which is false.
If you're going to make a claim that some Republicans are preventing the Democrat's memo from being released then feel free to name the names involved. My understanding is that it's entirely a process issue and Rep Schiff is a tool for claiming otherwise.
Selective disclosure? You mean that they should have also mentioned that he walked little old ladies across the street, so as to more accurately portray his character? All that's required to establish guilt is to the disclose the facts surrounding the alleged illegal activity. As long as these statements are truly facts, then guilt has been established. Additional statements beyond that don't matter much.
An FBI official's political beliefs do not constitute a conflict of interest. If that were true, why should the Special Counsel (Mueller) be allowed to be a Republican? Are we supposed to be erring on the side of the accused (Trump)?
> It shows his bias, which is a clear conflict of interest
If a police officer is investigating you for committing a crime, they don’t recuse themselves because they think you’re guilty. That’s why they’re investigating you.
> It shows his bias, which is a clear conflict of interest,
It only shows bias if there is evidence that the feeling confessed arose prior to the assembly of the dossier.
> The fact that it was not disclosed shows that either the leadership of the FBI was overzealous or also very biased
Or that the history of back-and-forth with FISC over FISA applications led them to believe that, in the totality of circumstances, this is not information that FISC would consider material in the application.
> The dossier was bought and paid for by the DNC. It had a partisan origin which was not disclosed.
That's a different issue than the issue of whether or not Steele’s personal strong opposition to Trump after gathering the dossier shows “bias” that negates it's credibility, which was the topic under discussion in this subthread.
Funny. A guy is paid by a political party to dig up or manufacture dirt on another candidate, and you don't think that this would be something that the court might be interested in when its asked to issue an extraordinary warrant based on it? You don't think him being paid wouldn't bias him?
Incredible.
We now have the spectacle of a partisan organization laundering opposition research through the FBI in order to engage the full power of the intelligence community to eavesdrop on the opposition.
If this doesn't signal the need for FISA reforms, what will?
So, what I've learned from this nothingburger is that Devin Nunes (and, presumably, he Trump White House, who he's been fairly openly acting as a shield for from day one) is really, really worried about the Carter Page piece of the investigation.
I don't see this release doing all that much politically other than raising the stakes; even assuming people miss that it's political spin, there's no new smoking gun even alleged here that is likely to change minds. I suppose it might shore up support among people whose reflexive support for Trump competes with reflexive support for law enforcwment, which is politically significant if the concern is the collapse of support in the Republican base, but I don't see it having resonance beyond that.
This is the furthest thing from a nothingburger. Comey testified under oath that the dossier was salacious and unverified. The FBI knew the document was opposition research created by Clinton and the DNC. Yet Comey approved surveillance on the Trump team based on that document. So in effect, the FBI worked with the democrats to falsify documents to go after a political opponent. This is a pretty big scandal.
> Yet Comey approved surveillance on the Trump team based on that document.
The surveillance started long before that dossier was put together. So it couldn't be based on the not-yet-compiled document regardless of what this document claims.
> The surveillance started long before that dossier was put together.
The FISA surveillance targeting Page did not. Information about Page, and implicating him as a Russian asset, was captured on surveillance of Russian nationals suspected of being spies in 2013, and was no doubt key to the FISA application (apparently, one of the points on which Democratic rebuttal challenges the Nunes memo’s characterization is on the centrality of the dossier info to the FISA application.)
> Yet Comey approved surveillance on the Trump team
At the time of the FISA warrant, Page was a former campaign staffer. Characterizing surveillance of him as surveillance of “the Trump team” is wildly inaccurate on many levels.
