Even the Wall Street Journal is turning on Schiff:
The IG, Nunes and Schiff. The Horowitz report reveals the Democrat’s many distortions.
Monday’s Justice Department Inspector General report on the FBI’s Trump -Russia probe is illuminating in many ways, not least the light it casts on the previous claims by politicians when they were telling the public about what they saw in classified documents. House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff in particular has been exposed for distortions and falsehoods.
Americans first learned about the FBI’s abuse of the FISA process in a February 2018 memo from then House Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes. The memo disclosed that the FBI had obtained surveillance warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court against former Trump aide Carter Page ; that the dossier written by ex-British spook Christopher Steele and financed by the Clinton campaign had formed an “essential” part of that application; and that the FBI failed to tell the FISA court about Mr. Steele’s political and media ties.
This was news, but Mr. Schiff and Democrats called the Nunes memo false and weeks later released a rival summary of the classified FISA evidence. Now the IG has settled the debate by confirming the details in the Nunes memo and exposing Mr. Schiff’s untruths.
The third line of the Schiff memo reads: “FBI and DOJ officials did not abuse the [FISA] process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign.” False. IG Michael Horowitz’s report lists the many and varied ways the FBI did all of those.
This includes overstating Mr. Steele’s credibility, omitting concerns about his sources, hiding exculpatory information, and even doctoring a document. The IG is concerned enough by “the extensive compliance failures” that he says he has begun “oversight” to assess FBI compliance “with policies that seek to protect the civil liberties of U.S. persons.”
The Schiff memo also claimed that “DOJ cited multiple sources to support the case for surveilling Page—but made only narrow use of information from Steele’s sources about Page’s specific activities in 2016 . . .” False again.
The Horowitz report says the FBI considered surveilling Mr. Page in August 2016 but decided it lacked probable cause. The bureau moved ahead with its FISA application after it received the Steele dossier on September 19, and the report says the dossier “played a central and essential role” in that decision. Mr. Horowitz says the part of the application detailing Mr. Page’s 2016 activities “relied entirely” on “information from Steele Reports.”
Mr. Schiff also claimed in 2018 that the Justice Department was straight with the FISA court about “Steele’s prior relationship with the FBI.” In fact, the IG says that the FBI “overstated the significance of Steele’s past reporting.” And in three later applications the FBI did not tell the court that it had talked to professional contacts of Mr. Steele who said he had a “lack of self-awareness, poor judgment,” and that he “pursued people with political risk but no intelligence value.”
Mr. Schiff claimed DOJ “met the rigor, transparency, and evidentiary basis needed to meet” FISA court standards. But Mr. Horowitz makes clear that FBI officials didn’t even tell senior Justice officials about the concerns and irregularities of its Page application. Would the court have granted warrants if it knew the whole story? We don’t know. But the IG report makes clear that about the only thing the FBI ever corroborated in the Steele report was publicly available information.
Mr. Schiff had access to the same documents as Mr. Nunes. His decision to misrepresent the FBI’s actions shows he is willing to distort the truth for political purposes. He gets away with this because he has a willing echo chamber in the Washington press corps.
blob:https://www.wsj.com/45ed1676-2191-4e7e-8059-d01dfb448c96