FISA Memo: FBI was weaponized against Trump [full text]

The White House sent a certification letter to Congress Friday morning officially declassifying the information in the FISA memo that is largely expected to show that the FBI was weaponized against Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election. The full memo was released a few hours later and appears to show exactly that.

The memo makes clear that surveillance of members of the Trump campaign would not have been approved except for the use of the Fusion GPS published Trump Dossier – a document that contains unsubstantiated allegations and was little more than political campaign opposition research.

In particular, the memo shows that Trump Dossier was essential for the initial and follow-up surveillance applications against Carter Page. In fact, the memo confirms that then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe knew that no FISA warrant would have been sought without the dossier and testified to that fact under oath.

Furthermore, Deupty Director McCabe testified before the [House Intelligence] Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.

During the FISA warrant application process, senior DOJ and FBI officials hid the source of the dossier, likely because they knew the warrants would not have been approved had the court known that the FBI’s only evidence came from a political opposition research firm being paid by the DNC, Hillary Clinton’s campaign and Barack Obama’s Organizing for America.

The officials involved in obtaining the FISA warrants under false pretenses were former FBI Director James Comey, former DBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Attornies General Sally Yates, Dana Boente and Rod Rosenstein. Each signed off on at least one FISA warrant application against a Trump campaign team member and all failed to disclose that the dossier was the sole source of evidence and that it had been funded by Democrats. Whether those officials were all complicit in the failure to disclose that critical piece of information is not made clear in the memo.

At its core, this indicates that the FBI had been used by Obama administration political appointees in a campaign to prevent a presidential candidate from winning the election. Senior members of the FBI used the FISA court against then-candidate Donald Trump.

Democrats are working frantically to discredit the memo calling it “spin” and “extraordinarily reckless.”

“President Trump has surrendered his constitutional responsibility as Commander-in-Chief by releasing highly classified and distorted intelligence,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement. “By not protecting intelligence sources and methods, he just sent his friend Putin a bouquet.”

No sources or methods were disclosed in the memo so it is unclear what intelligence she feels has been released. Not to be outdone, DNC President Tom Perez put out his own faux-outrage-ridden statement.

“This sham memo was written and released for one purpose and one purpose only: to discredit Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation,” Perez wrote in his statement.

FISA Surveillance Memo – Full Text