With the Courage of Devin Nunes, the Truth Shall Make Us Free

"AND, YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH, AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE." That is the message emblazoned across every line of the House Intelligence Committee Memo ("the Memo") released Friday. This time, being freed by the truth isn't a quote from the Founders or Burke or Churchill or anybody else who has ever touched politics. It was spoken by Jesus (John 8:32). And, today, truth and freedom are the gifts of Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, along with Representative Trey Gowdy and two investigators, who wrote the Memo, and the lawyers and the rest of the Committee members who vetted it and had the courage to release it so that Americans could read and see the truth of the Deep State cabal organized to destroy President Trump. • It was President Trump who told reporters Friday that he thinks "it's a disgrace. What's going on in this country, I think it's a disgrace. The Memo was sent to Congress...When you look at that and see that... A lot of people should be ashamed of themselves and much worse than that." The President didn't say it exactly, but he was talking about the truth being revealed so that Americans can see the evil in their midst. • • • JUDGE TRUTH BY THE WORDS OF THOSE WHO TRY TO DENY IT. There are plenty of Swamp Creatures and their lapdog mainstream media squealing like stuck pigs over the release of the Memo. • PROGDEMS. NBC News ran a headline that said "Experts warn : Dangerous politicizing of US intelligence" -- NBCwasn't talking about the politicized Obama FBI and DOJ, but about the Memo! The Washington Post wrote : "The House Intelligence Committee's release of a Memo declassified Friday by President Donald Trump alleging a government cover-up creates a dangerous precedent of partisans politicizing the government's secrets, according to veterans of the intelligence world." Got it? -- the Memo showing politicized FBI surveillance of a presidential candidate was "partisans politicizing." On CNN, Democrat Senator Richard Blumenthal ridiculously proclaimed about the report's release : "The release of this Memo is really reminiscent of the darkest days of the McCarthy era." Democrat Chris Murphy said on MSNBC : "This is amongst one of the most dangerous days of this presidency so far." Senator Jeff Merkley (D) told CNN : "This is extremely dangerous manipulation information [sic] in order to discredit an investigation." Democrat Senator Chris Van Hollen said : "We're at a very dangerous inflection point here. An incredible abuse of power." Senator Ben Cardin (D) -- we will get to Cardin later -- lamented on CNN : "This, to me, is very, very sad and dangerous. We're talking about defending the rule of law, defending the independence of the Department of Justice." And, Democrat Representative Ted Lieu went with the Nothing Burger routine : "I can't discuss the contents of the Memo, but I can say that it's worse than a Nothing Burger. It's like having Nothing Mustard." • THE MSM. News anchors resorted to their usual sensationalism, and they loved using Hillary's favorite phrase to describe the important Memo on DOJ misconduct a "Nothing Burger." CNN asked : "Imagine if Devin Nunes is feeding us a Nothing Burger." MSNBC's Joe Scarborough : "Talk about a Nothing Burger." HLN : "Oh for goodness sakes, the Memo...it could be a Nothing Burger." But, MSNBC avoided the burger routine : "So what happens if this thing does turn out to be...a dud? And I'm not saying the word(s) 'Nothing Burger' because I was asked by my segment producers not to use that cliche." • What do all these ProgDem / MSM protests mean?? That they have seen the turth and are trying their best to deride it. The ProgDems and MSM will continue to belittle the Memo, because it doesn't support their Fake narrative of sinister Trump corruption and angelic Democratic virtue. Is America fooled? Oh no, friends, not likely. • • • THE GESTAPO LIVED IN THE OBAMA FBI AND DOJ. That isn't news to most of us. We have been demanding that somebody open the floodgates and let out the real story behind Obama, Hillary, Holder, Lynch, Comey, Mueller, McCabe, Strzok, Rosenstein, Yates, and the rest of the Deep Staters buried in the Obama FBI and DOJ. • Well, Representative Nunes opened the dam and the flood of truth has the perfume of sweet rain after a prolonged drought. • Kenneth Timmerman wrote an Opinion piece for TheHill in which he said : "Nunes Memo revelations prove the FBI makes up its own rules. It’s no coincidence that Democrats have gone apoplectic about the Memo. It clearly shows that the FBI, under the direction of then-Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andy McCabe, presented paid political dirt to the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court in order to obtain warrants to spy on American citizens." Timmerman called their acts "effectively Gestapo-like tactics." • The intrusive and largely uncheckable powers of the US government’s intelligence apparatus, with the aid of the FISA court (FISC), were used against US citizens in an effort to achieve a political goal -- destroying the candidacy and then the nascent presidency of Donald Trump, who was legally elected and duly sworn in as the 45th President of the United States. To achieve their goal, they took over the Steele Russia Dossier opposition research file of the Democrat political party then in power and then directed its lies and invented 'facts' against people in the Republican opposition party, starting with Trump campaign volunteer, Carter Page -- and we should be sure to understand that surveilling Carter Page was tantamount to surveilling candidate and then President Trump because the surveillance warrant, once issued by the FISC, undoubtedly opened up the entire Trump team to indirect surveillance if Page conversed by phone or electronically with any of them. But, as Professor Alan Derschowitz said on Friday, we should be allowed to see the FISC application for the Page warrant and judge for ourselves its level of propriety. • • • THE CONTENTS OF THE MEMO. Representative Devin Nunes and his committee members and staff were careful in drafting the Memo to summarize highly-classified intelligence information about the unethical and compromising misuse of the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act (FISA). The Memo as released shows that the highest echelons of leadership at both the FBI and the DOJ misled the FISC about the origin of the opposition research and the author’s anti-Trump bias in order to obtain warrants to conduct surveillance on US citizens associated with the Trump campaign, and later, the Trump transition team. The Memo states : “Then-Director James Comey signed three FISA applications in question on behalf of the FBI, and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe signed one. Then-DAG (Deputy Attorney General) Sally Yates, then-Acting DAG Dana Boente, and DAG Rod Rosenstein each signed one or more FISA applications on behalf of DOJ.” The Memo makes clear that the “essential” basis for making the application to the court to spy on American citizens was the Steele Russia Dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign committee and the Democratic National Committee. It states that McCabe told the House Intelligence Committee in December that without the information from the Steele dossier, no surveillance warrant for Page would have been sought and, in September 2016, Steele admitted to deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr -- another partisan Democrat -- that he was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being President.” Ohr “recorded” that information, which was subsequently found in official FBI files. But it was “not reflected in any of the Page FISA applications,” the Memo states. • The Memo also states that the FBI and DOJ used media reporting to lend credibility to the Dossier, while the firm behind the dossier, Fusion GPS, briefed major American news outlets to include New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, New Yorker, Yahoo and Mother Jones. The Memo states that information on the now-infamous anti-Trump Dossier compiled by Steele was “omitted” when requesting a FISA warrant for Page : “Neither the initial application in October 2016, nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior DOJ and FBI officials.” But, according to the Memo, Page’s FISA application “cited extensively” a September 23, 2016 Yahoo News article, which focused on Page’s trip to Moscow. The Memo pointed out that the “article does not corroborate the Steele dossier because it is derived from information leaked by Steele himself to Yahoo News. The Page FISA application incorrectly assesses that Steele did not directly provide information to Yahoo News,” the Memo said, noting that Steele admitted in a British court to meeting with Yahoo News, along with other news outlets in September 2016 to share details in the dossier. Steele was terminated by the FBI for talking to the media, but Steele remained in close contact with then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr. At that time, Ohr “worked closely” with Yates and later Rosenstein, and Ohr’s wife Nellie began working for Fusion GPS, the firm behind the Dossier, as early as May 2016. Fusion GPS was being paid by the law firm Perkins Coie, hired by the Hillary campaign, presumably to cover its involvement in the creation of the Dossier. • So, we have the Department of Justice, then controlled by Loretta Lynch and her deputy, Sally Yates, and the FBI, then led by Comey and McCabe, apparently finding it perfectly normal that the source of the information they used to justify “probable cause” to the FISC was a dedicated political enemy of candidate Donald Trump. Why?? The only plausible answer is that they all agreed with Steele. • Representative Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, will certainly never apologize for his efforts to cover up this disgraceful abuse by Deep State Democrats of the intelligence community. His latest effort has been to get Twitter and Facebook to remove recent accounts that used the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo. Schiff is so proud of his effort that he put out a press release commending himself and including his letters to the social media companies. • • • THE GRAVE THREAT TO AMERICAN RULE OF LAW. No administration should be allowed to mis-use the intelligence community, or the FISA surveillance court, in such a way. It will lead to the American Republic becoming a police state run by an unaccountable "Gestapo" of enforcers. The truly frightening thing about all this is that America narrowly dodged that bullet in November 2016. The election of Hillary Clinton would have enshrined the Obam FBI / DOJ police state tactics and continued to use them to destroy any political opposition to their Progressive-marxist regime. • There is no better proof of where the Obama-Clinton ProgDem regime was headed than the tweets of former FBI director James Comey after the release of the Memo on Friday. Comey tweeted : "That’s it? Dishonest and misleading Memo wrecked the House intel committee, destroyed trust with Intelligence Community, damaged relationship with FISA court, and inexcusably exposed classified investigation of an American citizen. For what? DOJ & FBI must keep doing their jobs.” Fox News host Tucker Carlson went after James Comey on Friday, calling him an “aspiring MSNBC contributor.” Carlson said on his show Friday : “Comey took to Twitter today not to...address the facts the Memo raised, but to mock the release of the Memo like the aspiring MSNBC contributor he apparently is. He didn’t bother to explain how it was ‘dishonest and misleading.’ Of course he didn’t. Comey, who leaked his notes on private meetings with the President in a petty revenge move after being fired, is now declaring it beyond the pale somehow for Congress to carry out its constitutional duties of oversight of the FBI." Comey has taken to tweeting commentary on controversies surrounding the Trump administration. After the FBI released a rare statement earlier this week condemning the release of the Memo on the basis that it omits important context, Comey praised the FBI for “speaking up” against “weasels and liars.” • The Patriot Post wrote on Friday : "Since much of what the Memo claims has long been rumored, in one sense its release may feel a bit anti-climactic. But key names have been named, such as former FBI Director James Comey, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, current Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, FBI agent Peter Strzok and former FBI Deputy Director McCabe. The can of worms has now been pried open, and this is officially a scandal. How deep do the roots go? We’ll see as the real digging begins. This is exactly why the DOJ, FBI and Democrats have been so adamant about preventing the Memo’s release. It’s important to note that Congress doesn’t work for the DOJ or the FBI, rather it has oversight over those agencies. Yet the FBI has been stonewalling Congress while leaking info to the mainstream media, as it sought to both insulate itself from oversight and control the narrative surrounding Russiagate. When officials from the nation’s highest law enforcement agency engage in politically calculated actions rather than strictly focusing on enforcing the law, then injustice will result. This politicization must be weeded out, for the good of the country at large. It is time for the appointment of a second special prosecutor to investigate the activities of Barack Obama’s Deep State operatives in the FBI and DOJ. It is now clear that there was 'collusion,' but it was between Hillary Clinton, the FBI and the Russians." • • • WHAT DO WE KNOW NOW? Because the Memo was released, the American public now knows several things it did not know for a certainty before -- • We have confirmation that the Dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele was used in obtaining surveillance warrants for former Trump staffer Carter Page. A longstanding accusation of those who object to the Mueller investigation is that since Steele and his handlers at Fusion GPS were paid by Trump’s political opponents, Steele’s work shouldn’t be allowed to be used by the FBI and DOJ against the Trump campaign. • We know the names of the Justice Department officials who sought warrants against Page -- former FBI Director James Comey, the recently ousted Andrew McCabe and Resistance hero, Sally Yates, and also Trump appointees Dana Boente and Rod Rosenstein. • We have corroboration of prior reports that the wife of a since-demoted Justice Department official acted as the conduit for Steele’s dossier. She worked for the research firm that employed Steele and passed it on to her husband and the agency. • We now know that the FBI cut ties with Steele when he confirmed to a friendly reporter that he was involved in the investigation in the fall of 2016. • BUT, we also know something that reaches into the future -- since the FBI wrongfully, unethically and perhaps illegally withheld the real source of their information in seeking the FISA warrant, the warrant and its renewals would have been granted in error, and that would deny the DOJ any use of the information obtained under those warrants. A criminal defense lawyer would certainly move to exclude such tainted evidence at any potential trial or indictment. • • • WHERE DOES THIS LEAVE MUELLER? Rush Limbaugh nails Mueller. In his February 2 radio show, Limbaugh said : "The Nunes Memo released Friday shows special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating the wrong people “on purpose. I was really worried that expectations for this Memo had been raised so high that no matter what the contents people would react, ‘Is that it? Is that all?’ Folks, if anything, this Memo was undersold. The revelations in this Memo, even though the foundation of it we suspected and were very certain were true, the add-on items, the confirmation of the political corruption of the FBI at the upper levels and the DOJ, ditto, is inescapable....now we find out that the special counsel is investigating the wrong people! And that’s on purpose! The special counsel needs to be investigating the Clinton campaign and its conspiring with Russia to influence the outcome of a presidential election....The collusion, the conspiring, all of that happened with the Democrat Party, with Hillary Clinton, the DNC, Fusion GPS, and the wife of Bruce Ohr, a DOJ official whose wife worked at Fusion GPS...it’s entirely a Democrat-run operation! Trump was nowhere near it. The special counsel is now looking for evidence of Trump conspiring with Russia...there’s none. Nobody found any. Now they’re looking at Trump obstructing justice. This is a major, major expose. The Swamp, the establishment has had the lid blown off of it today.” • Limbaugh hit every button : "Republicans said it was a good start to bringing transparency to the bias in the federal government by bureaucrats seeking to undermine President Trump. It was those bureaucrats, the Memo revealed, who knew that Christopher Steele wrote the dossier with the assistance of Russian agents. They knew that Christopher Steele passionately opposed Donald Trump and did not want him to become President. They knew all of this. They knew it was made up....People at the Department of Justice and the FBI -- and this means Loretta Lynch. This means James Comey. This means up to Obama. This means people knew that the Steele dossier was an opposition research document from the Clinton campaign. It was not intelligence. They knew that but did not inform that FISA court of that.” • Rush Limbaugh is saying what the GOP congressional leadership will still not utter -- that the Mueller special counsel probe is a house built on sand and it should be dismantled immediately. There is no basis for a special counsel because there is not now and never has been the underlying probability of criminal activity that must be the basis for a special counsel's authority to investigate anyone. • • • NUNES SPEAKS ABOUT THE MEMO. Devin Nunes spoke to Fox News Bret Baier on Friday. In the wake of the release Friday of the Memo he spearheaded that alleges politically motivated abuse of the nation’s surveillance system by the FBI and the Justice Department, he’s being called a Russian agent and much worse, and there are demands that he be removed from the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee. But, Nunes, a Republican congressman from California, said : "We have the underlying facts. We’ve been investigating this for a really long time...you know that you’re over the target when you’re being attacked from all sides.” Nunes told Baier : "I have an obligation to the American people when we see FISA abuse. The American citizens who come before this court have to be protected, and the only place that can protect them is the US Congress when abuses do occur.” Nunes said there was no coordination with Trump or with his lawyers or outside conservative groups in the formulation of the Memo. Nunes told Baier that his “bottom line” is that Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray “have work to do, and they can’t start doing their work to root out the problems if you don’t admit first that you have a problem, and they’ve been unwilling to do that.” In his interview with Baier, Nunes responded to criticism that the Memo has material omissions that impact its accuracy : “We looked specifically at just FISA abuse. We wanted to keep sources and methods out....We didn’t disclose any [national] secrets.” Nunes affirmed that his committee will vote to release a Democratic Memo on the issue, noting it must go through the same vetting process, adding : “And don’t forget, these are the same Democrats who never wanted to start an investigation. These are the same Democrats who tried to block our subpoenas back in August. They tried to block our ability to go and get the records from Fusion GPS that led to a lot of discoveries in this investigation. So, these are not honest actors. They know they’re not being honest actors. I get tired of playing whack-a-mole every day with Democrats who never wanted to start this investigation in the first place.” Baier asked why he would not release the transcript of the McCabe testimony, and Nunes said he wouldn’t mind releasing it, but the committee would have to go through a lengthy process. Nunes was adamant : “They wouldn’t have received a warrant without the Dossier. The Dossier was presented to the court as if it was true....Just step back for a moment. This is not trying to go after some terrorist. The FBI opened a counter-intelligence investigation into the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016. And then they got a warrant on someone in the Trump campaign, using opposition research paid for by the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign. That’s what this is about. It’s wrong, and it should never be done.” Nunes also responded to a claim by Democrats that the FISA court was told of the political nature of the information. Is that true? Baier asked. “No,” Nunes replied. “These guys tell so many lies, you can’t keep track of them. If the court did know that, the judge would have to be, I think, considered very suspect. But I don’t believe that happened at all.” Baier asked Nunes about former FBI Director James Comey’s tweet Friday. Nunes replied : “Mr. Comey had a chance in January, February, March, April -- I believe all the way to June -- to come clean on who paid for the Dossier. He was asked about it in January, and he said very clearly that he knew that Republicans had started the Dossier, which was a lie.” When asked further who finished the Dossier, Comey said he didn’t know, Nunes pointed out, adding : “Mr. Comey is welcome to come back and tell us when, exactly, he learned that the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton paid for the Dossier. I think the American people understand that the FBI should not go to secret courts, using information that was paid for by the Democrats to open up an investigation to get warrants on people of the other political party. That’s the type of stuff that happens in banana republics.” Nunes noted that the source of the information was the Russians : “So, there is clear evidence of collusion with the Russians. It just happens to be with the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee that the mainstream media fails to investigate." Baier asked Nunes if he saw a connection between the Russia Dossier and the Mueller probe. Nunes answered : “I think the mainstream media and the Democrats are tying this to the Mueller investigation, because they’re trying to perpetuate this nonsense of obstruction of justice, because they’ve left the Russia collusion issue. They know there was no collusion. I’ve been saying this for a year now, that there was no evidence of collusion.” Nunes affirmed that the Memo completes only the FISA-abuse portion of his committee’s investigation. The committee now is in the middle of the second phase, which is examining the role of other departments in the investigation of the Trump campaign. At the moment, Nunes said, they are looking at the State Department’s role. • • • DEAR READERS, the overall impression the Memo leaves is of an FBI and higher DAG / AAG / AG levels at the Obama DOJ that were totally politicized. And, that is the whole point. To prove this will require congressional testimony under oath in the hope of catching perjury, or building the case from documents already in congressional files for criminal trials (gathering evidence of political misuse of the DOJ and FBI assembled on a defendant-by-defendant basis). • Hillary and the DNC clearly had their tentacles into the FBI and DOJ. They were trying to defeat Trump by using the FBI. This is a line of investigation that AG Sessions and/or Congress need to pursue. It is not good enough to stop at the FBI and DOJ. It is necessary to go after the heads of the hydra -- Hillary, the DNC, and even George Soros as financier, if possible. • And, at long last,Congress needs to begin asking "what did Obama know and when did he know it." Did Comey sign off on the FISA application without talking to Obama's DNI James Clapper or national security advisor Susan Rice. Did Comey talk directly to Obama? If Comey talked to any of them, did he lie, or did he tell them what he knew, especially when the renewals of the FISA warrants came around. What were their responses? Did they tell him to proceed or to stop? "What did Obama know and when did he know it." • AG Sessions can jump into all of this because it has nothing to do with Russia. It is about FBI / DOJ malfeasance and the possible criminal actions of elected officials and political party leaders. • President Trump has made the clearest summary of what we have been through in the last few days. On Saturday morning he tweeted : "This memo totally vindicates “Trump” in probe. But the Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on. Their was no Collusion and there was no Obstruction (the word now used because, after one year of looking endlessly and finding NOTHING, collusion is dead). This is an American disgrace! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2018." • It could not be more clear. "And ye shall know the truth. And, the truth shall make you free."