The Partisan Gap
It is always entertaining reading blogs from both sides of the political aisle. Here are articles from the last day or so after the Saturday FBI document dump of the redacted FISA application
Scott Johnson at Powerline: "DEVIN NUNES VINDICATED"
Kevin Drum at Mother Jones: "Now We Know For Sure: Devin Nunes Lied About Everything"
The hilarious part is that the vast majority of articles from both sides have a tone of, "well, this should put the question to rest." LOL.
I really don't have an opinion about the Nunes memo, nor do I really care. A few random thoughts
- I have not read the FISA application, nor will I ever, but the Saturday evening drop time is not usually a marker of something an agency is proud of
- I don't think the Carter Page surveillance likely did much harm, but it strikes me that the bar for starting a secret national security spying effort against members of an active Presidential campaign should be a little higher. In fact, I have always felt the FISA bar should be higher for everyone.
- Almost no matter the details, the handling by the Obama Administration of Russian spying allegations seems weirdly passive-aggressive -- both overly aggressive against minor figures like Carter Page and strangely silent and passive on the broader details. It is strange to me that so many Obama administration officials can be so vocally worried about Russian spying after November 2016 and so silent and ineffective on it before that date, when they actually had power to do something about it. I know Republican partisans will explain this with "because bias," and this may be the case, but without any direct knowledge I always prefer to default to incompetence. Certainly screaming about it now on every cable talk show seems to have diverted attention from the question of what the f*ck they were dong when it was actually their job to tackle this kind of thing.
