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Julian Sanchez @normative
, 14 tweets, 3 min read Read on Twitter
This isn’t surprising, but it’s depressing.
Though this does increase my inclination to think that the disclosure, while very likely damaging to the ongoing investigation & possibly intelligence gathering more generally, is likely to cut the opposite of the way Trump hopes.
One thing I’m curious about. Trump wants just 20 specific pages of one of the Carter Page FISA applications declassified. He himself says he hasn’t read them. I rather doubt he’s read the redacted version published this summer. Who supplied him with the page ranges?
There are valid and invalid reasons one might want to release particular parts of the application and leave other parts classified. After the comically dishonest cherry-picking we saw in the Nunes memo, I have no confidence whatever that the selection was made for good reasons.
Hm. So, none of the gaggle of House Republicans who’ve requested declassification are on HPSCI. Presumably they don’t really know what’s in the pages they’ve asked for either.
That makes me somewhat less anxious about cherry picking, unless they’re themselves being fed by Nunes’ staff. But also suggests they don’t really know whether those sections actually show anything shady, or risk burning sources.
I mean, I assume they ARE being fed. Likely by the staffers responsible for the Nunes memo, which most of the same folks peddled enthusiastically, and still don’t seem to understand was garbage.
It is, I think, pretty suggestive that these demands are being funneled through a bunch of TV-happy reps who demonstrably don’t understand FISA or intelligence very well.
This statement reads like it was written by people who’ve been given language to use by people who at least halfway know what they’re talking about, but don’t themselves understand what they’re saying too well. zeldin.house.gov/media-center/p…
For instance, there’s boilerplate about “about collection”, which is usually a concern raised in the 702 context, and “bulk collection,” which tends to come up re: metadata collextion and 12333. Neither is likely to be relevant to a Title I FISA on a USP.
In principle you could have a facility tasked for the purpose of obtaining information “about” a Title I target, but it seems really unlikely here, and there’s no way they can assert it DOES grant that authority without seeing the facilities and proposed minimization procedures.
It’s like a weird word salad an AI might assemble if you fed it a random sample of Google hits for “FISA criticism”
In a saner universe the Nunes experience would’ve chastened these guys, but I suspect they’re stuck in a friendly-media feedback loop that insulates them from the recognizing how completely the published docs exploded all their breathless claims.
Let me make the following offer to House staff: If you want to attack overbroad surveillance authorities, I will happily come in and brief you so you can connect the right criticisms to the right statutory authorities.
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