Publisher's Notebook
Record number of readers vote
Bruce Trogdon
Last week, The House Intelligence Committee voted to release to the public a Republican supported, four-page memo alleging bias and improper surveillance by the FBI. It was released after being extensively screened and after President Trump agreed to declassify it.
The report asserts that agents of the FBI convinced a foreign surveillance court to, in effect, spy on the Trump campaign by using an opposition research dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign. Critically, the report also accuses higher-ups in the FBI of not explicitly telling the court that the Clinton campaign specifically was the funder of the dossier.
The dossier was compiled by a former British spy named Christopher Steele who has been reported to be very much opposed to President Trump. The Republican assertion is that this memo was critical to the FBI’s case in getting the surveillance order, so it was totally improper and unethical not to tell the court exactly who provided this fundamental evidence used to support the FISA warrant application.
Naturally, this is a big deal. You don’t want your government, through the FBI, spying on opponents of the party in power. In many ways this would be worse than Watergate, if true. Democrats contend that the memo spearheaded by Republican Congressman Devin Nunes was nothing more than cherry-picked information from classified documents and misrepresented the testimony of a top FBI official.
Nunes stands by his memo. “We had to use this process in order to make it public because DOJ and FBI were refusing to investigate themselves, refusing to acknowledge that there were serious problems,” he said.
Just as naturally, the Democratic members of The House Intelligence Committee voted Monday to send the White House a classified memorandum challenging claims in the Republican memo. To the credit of Republicans on the panel, they joined Democrats in voting to take a key step toward disclosing the Democrat-approved classified document, even though it offers a point-by-point rebuttal of the memo released last week by Chairman Nunes, R-Calif. The White House confirmed early Tuesday that it had received the Democratic memo from the committee and that Trump had seen it.
“As stated many times, the administration will follow the same process and procedure with this memorandum from the minority as it did last week, when it received the memorandum from the majority,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. She added that the Democratic memo would “go through a full and thorough legal and national security review” and that afterward, Trump would be briefed on its findings.
What does it say about the state of our country if the Republican memo is indeed accurate? What does it say about the state of our country that there now has to be both a “Republican memo” and a “Democrat memo?”
I have written ad nauseam about how depressing it is for me to see how divided our country has become. But, once again, it is depressing for me to see how divided our country has become. To me that is the bigger problem here, no matter which side is to be believed. Just the fact that we now have to have two versions of intelligence reports in the first place.
We can no longer trust that almost anything we read in the news media is not just more “fake news.” Or, more succinctly, biased news reporting. Now, apparently, we can no longer trust anything that the FBI says either. Basically, we have met the enemy and it is us.
That’s my take, what’s yours? Do you believe that agents of the FBI conspired to spy on and plot against the Trump campaign? Vote your own thoughts in our weekly online poll by going to thepostnewspapers.com site. Choose from “Yes, it’s a very bad deal; “Maybe, but there are probably biased agents on both sides; or “No, it’s just a Trump plot to undermine the special prosecutor.”
Last week’s poll saw another overall record number of Post newspaper readers voting. Thank you, I love it! Our question was “After hearing Trump’s State of the Union speech, are you more or less optimistic about his presidency?” More than 86.6 percent were either more optimistic (46.5 percent) or felt the same way about him as they did before the speech (40.1 percent). Only 13.4 percent were less optimistic.
The report asserts that agents of the FBI convinced a foreign surveillance court to, in effect, spy on the Trump campaign by using an opposition research dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign. Critically, the report also accuses higher-ups in the FBI of not explicitly telling the court that the Clinton campaign specifically was the funder of the dossier.
The dossier was compiled by a former British spy named Christopher Steele who has been reported to be very much opposed to President Trump. The Republican assertion is that this memo was critical to the FBI’s case in getting the surveillance order, so it was totally improper and unethical not to tell the court exactly who provided this fundamental evidence used to support the FISA warrant application.
Naturally, this is a big deal. You don’t want your government, through the FBI, spying on opponents of the party in power. In many ways this would be worse than Watergate, if true. Democrats contend that the memo spearheaded by Republican Congressman Devin Nunes was nothing more than cherry-picked information from classified documents and misrepresented the testimony of a top FBI official.
Nunes stands by his memo. “We had to use this process in order to make it public because DOJ and FBI were refusing to investigate themselves, refusing to acknowledge that there were serious problems,” he said.
Just as naturally, the Democratic members of The House Intelligence Committee voted Monday to send the White House a classified memorandum challenging claims in the Republican memo. To the credit of Republicans on the panel, they joined Democrats in voting to take a key step toward disclosing the Democrat-approved classified document, even though it offers a point-by-point rebuttal of the memo released last week by Chairman Nunes, R-Calif. The White House confirmed early Tuesday that it had received the Democratic memo from the committee and that Trump had seen it.
“As stated many times, the administration will follow the same process and procedure with this memorandum from the minority as it did last week, when it received the memorandum from the majority,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. She added that the Democratic memo would “go through a full and thorough legal and national security review” and that afterward, Trump would be briefed on its findings.
What does it say about the state of our country if the Republican memo is indeed accurate? What does it say about the state of our country that there now has to be both a “Republican memo” and a “Democrat memo?”
I have written ad nauseam about how depressing it is for me to see how divided our country has become. But, once again, it is depressing for me to see how divided our country has become. To me that is the bigger problem here, no matter which side is to be believed. Just the fact that we now have to have two versions of intelligence reports in the first place.
We can no longer trust that almost anything we read in the news media is not just more “fake news.” Or, more succinctly, biased news reporting. Now, apparently, we can no longer trust anything that the FBI says either. Basically, we have met the enemy and it is us.
That’s my take, what’s yours? Do you believe that agents of the FBI conspired to spy on and plot against the Trump campaign? Vote your own thoughts in our weekly online poll by going to thepostnewspapers.com site. Choose from “Yes, it’s a very bad deal; “Maybe, but there are probably biased agents on both sides; or “No, it’s just a Trump plot to undermine the special prosecutor.”
Last week’s poll saw another overall record number of Post newspaper readers voting. Thank you, I love it! Our question was “After hearing Trump’s State of the Union speech, are you more or less optimistic about his presidency?” More than 86.6 percent were either more optimistic (46.5 percent) or felt the same way about him as they did before the speech (40.1 percent). Only 13.4 percent were less optimistic.
