One thing is abundantly clear about the hotly debated four-page FISA memo, which is said to be about Obama-era abuses of the executive branch’s surveillance under federal law. That is that substantive questions have arisen in the course of the Mueller investigation that have gone unanswered.
Andrew McCarthy at National Review Online maintains that there are six such questions, none of them calling for “nuanced” answers. They are reprinted below for your convenience:
- Were associates of President Trump, members of his campaign, or even Trump himself, subjected to foreign-intelligence surveillance (i.e., do the FISA applications name them as either targets or persons whose communications and activities would likely be monitored)?
- information from the Steele dossier used in FISA applications?
- Steele-dossier information was so used, was it so central that FISA warrants would not have been granted without it?
- If Steele-dossier information was so used, was it corroborated by independent FBI investigation?
- If the dossier’s information was so used, was the source accurately conveyed to the court so that credibility and potential bias could be weighed (i.e., was the court told that the information came from an opposition-research project sponsored by the Clinton presidential campaign)?
- The FBI has said that significant efforts were made to corroborate Steele’s sensational claims, yet former director James Comey has acknowledged (in June 2017 Senate testimony) that the dossier was “unverified.” If the dossier was used in FISA applications in 2016, has the Justice Department — consistent with its continuing duty of candor in dealings with the tribunal — alerted the court that it did not succeed in verifying Steele’s hearsay reporting based on anonymous sources?
Given the president’s very close and direct relationship with the people, via Twitter primarily, there a growing clamor for President Trump to read the FISA memo at his State of the Union Address.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Though unorthodox, the idea has its merits. For one thing, it is becoming increasingly less likely that the American people will learn the contents of the document any other way, now that the Democrats and their water carriers in the mainstream media have initiated an all-out campaign to distort it.
Considering that Republicans have called the memo “Watergate on steroids,” while Democrats have countered that it is much ado about nothing, we, the people, have a right to know for ourselves which it is.
