BillyT, what do you think of this Tucker Carlson vid?

I watched up to nearly the eight minute mark, and took a few quick notes. Will watch a bit more later and post some more.

A key thing to keep in mind is Carlson’s view of the release of the warrant, the docs themselves, is, to be generous, highly idiosyncratic. It’s not shared beyond the right-wing bubble.

Other notes:

The Steele dossier hasn’t been discredited. Much of it has been confirmed, in fact. It was just one of many things used to get the FISA warrant on Page, and not the central rationale, by any means. That warrant was reauthorized four times, by four Republican judges, appointed by Republican presidents, btw. If they had seen problems with it, that never would have happened.

The accusation of being an agent for a foreign power is not in any way the same thing as an accusation of treason. Flynn and Manafort, for example, lied about their status as agents for foreign powers, had to redo their security forms, but are not being accused of “treason.” Page said that he was a foreign agent several times, and bragged about his connections with the Kremlin. He brought this on himself.

Carlson also lied when he said Steele was on the Clinton payroll. That never happened. Not even close.

Another key for me: I’ve never, ever heard Fox hosts or Republican Congresscritters ever give a damn about FISA warrants and the process until now. It’s only because Page might cause problems for Trump that they suddenly care about “civil liberties.” And it’s telling that on the same day the House Republicans made such a big stink about Page and the FISA warrant, they reauthorized the FISA program without changes.

I bumped into this in my saved file:

Now We Know For Sure: Devin Nunes Lied About Everything Kevin DrumJul. 24, 2018 9:55 PM

Excerpt:

Generally speaking, Nunes’ contention is that (a) the entire FISA application is based on the Steele dossier, (b) the Steele dossier is a partisan pile of lies, and (c) this goes to show that the FBI had it in for the Trump campaign.

But as we can now see, virtually everything Nunes said is untrue. The FBI investigation originally started in summer 2016, when the Australian ambassador to Britain reported a conversation he had with George Papadopoulos in which Papadopoulos implied that he had Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton. They were further alarmed by the very public attitude of the Trump campaign toward Russia. They had been keeping an eye on Carter Page for years at that point, and the Steele dossier’s claim that Page had spoken with Russian officials alarmed them yet further. Finally, after Page lied about those meetings, the FBI asked the FISA court for a warrant to surveil him.

The warrant was approved by a Republican judge. Not then, and at no time since, has she suggested she was duped. Ditto for the judges who signed the subsequent extensions, all of them Republicans. Finally, the sheer volume of redacted material—which grew larger in each application for extension—strongly suggests that the FBI had quite a bit of material well beyond just the Steele dossier.

Finally, it’s worth keeping in mind that the standard for a FISA warrant is “probable cause” that the target is an “agent of a foreign power.” This is not a negligible standard, but neither does it require bulletproof evidence. In this case we have Page’s known travels; his meetings with Russian officials; his own admission that he was an “informal adviser” to the Kremlin; his lie about his meetings with Sechin and Divyekin; and the contents of the Steele dossier. Plus, of course, whatever else is hiding under all those redactions. In the real world, that’s way more than enough to get approval for a surveillance warrant.

Bottom line: Devin Nunes, unsurprisingly, has lied about virtually everything he said. The Carter Page warrant was perfectly ordinary and the FBI showed no particular bias in applying for it. Nor did the judge show any bias in approving it. It was all pretty routine, and the only unusual thing about it is that presidential candidates usually don’t hire multiple advisers with unexplained connections to Russian officialdom. But Donald Trump did.