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Charlie Savage @charlie_savage
, 12 tweets, 3 min read Read on Twitter
1) When Nunes memo came out on Friday, Schiff statement singled out two key claims in particular as "serious mischaracterizations of the FISA application." The newly released less-redacted version of the Grassley/Graham criminal referral re Steele illuminates both.
2) (Here's the newly released version of Grassley/Graham judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/… )
3) One critique of Nunes memo was it suggested FBI failed to alert court that Steele research had politically motivated origins (thus misleading re neutrality/credibility), but FBI did tell the court that, w/out naming names. G/G memo confirms the alert is in the application.
4) Another critique of the Nunes memo was it claimed the Yahoo News article (derived from Steele) was used to corroborate Steele, but that is not why the article was referenced. The G/G memo appears to confirm that it was not presented for the purpose of corroboration.
5) Rather, G/G referral complains that the application said the FBI did not believe Steele "directly" provided info to Yahoo, which now looks wrong. That is, the FBI was saying Steele's info had indirectly reached Yahoo through an intermediary.
6) Here's that passage. If I am correctly interpreting G/G's telling, then, the court was told Yahoo was indirectly recycling Steele's info, which means it wasn't told that the Yahoo article amounted to independent corroboration of Steele's info.
7) That makes sense. FISA experts, like David Kris, have told me that no FISA application would include an article citing anon sources claiming the govt is scrutinizing X for purpose of showing establishing X as a fact; the judge would say "you are the govt - tell me directly."
8) Rather than as corroborating facts, they said, you'd instead put an article like that in an application to show the court that the fact of the investigation to had become public, making it more likely subject would destroy evidence or try to conceal his actions.
9) So G/G's complaint about Yahoo article is diff from Nunes memo. The line saying FBI didn't think Steele *directly* provided his info to Yahoo appears off bc Steele later said he talked to Yahoo. G/G suggest Steele may have misled FBI about whether he was talking to reporters.
10) If so, that would go to his credibility in general, which would go to the credibility of the Trump-Russia info he supplied, and which was used in both the original applications and the extensions.
11) Or, if Steele never actually told the FBI he wasn't talking to reporters - because of redactions, it's not clear - then G/G's gotcha is just that the FBI failed to correct the record in subsequent applications when it became clear that it assumed wrong.
12) The takeaway appears to be that G/G and Nunes/HPSCI were each trying to discredit Steele and the FISA application in different ways. Ironically, the G/G referral puts forth facts that are incompatible with the Nunes memo's key suggestions, unintentionally undermining it.
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