The memo released

The memo is out. Here are some key takeaways, courtesy of the Washington Examiner:

• The Steele dossier formed an essential part of the initial and all three renewal FISA applications against Carter Page.
• Andrew McCabe confirmed that no FISA warrant would have been sought from the FISA Court without the Steele dossier information.
• The political origins of the Steele dossier were known to senior DOJ and FBI officials, but excluded from the FISA applications.
• DOJ official Bruce Ohr met with Steele beginning in the summer of 2016 and relayed to DOJ information about Steele’s bias. Steele told Ohr that he, Steele, was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected president and was passionate about him not becoming president.

The key point: The FBI did not disclose to the FISA court that the information it used in the warrant application was opposition research on Trump paid for by the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. That was a gross abuse of the power of the FBI and DOJ, which employed a private contractor (Fusion-GPS) to dig dirt and gave it access to NSA intercept data on American citizens.

This memo doesn’t include everything the HIC knows about the matter, suggesting that this is just the tip of the iceberg. There may be more political wrangling over this in the months ahead.

But that’s not the iceberg. Consider these points from the excellent Last Refuge:

The House Intelligence Memo is simply using the example of currently known FISA abuse to open the door and show the U.S. electorate how corrupt this unaccountable institution has become.  Behind that door are very uncomfortable realities for all of those who constructed the weaponized agency; and also those who have benefited from it.

Consider:

When IRS head Lois Lerner unlawfully sent the 21 CD-ROM’s containing the “Schedule B” filings of over a million Americans to the Obama administration, the recipient was the DOJ. (LINK)  It was the DOJ who was chosen to utilize the political lists in their “Secret Research Project“.

When U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen demanded DOJ lawyers attend ethics classes due to their false representations to his court — he was highlighting a corrupt DOJ. (LINK)

When the case against the Bundy family was recently thrown out of court, it was the “gross malicious conduct” of the DOJ highlighted by the judge. (LINK)

This is the same DOJ who denied their own Office of Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, the right to conduct oversight on DOJ internal action. (LINK – pdf)  The expressed Justice Department intent in every action has been an attempt to remain unaccountable.

The U.S. Justice Department has become a rogue agency weaponized against its political opposition in almost every jurisdiction.

The Russian collusion investigation is a decoy to distract us from a scandal that is far bigger than Watergate, which brought down a sitting president.

Under Richard Nixon, five guys broke into DNC offices at the Watergate hotel to get dirt on Daniel Ellsberg of “Pentagon papers” fame.

Under Barack Obama, the surveillance powers of the NSA and legal authority of the Department of Justice were deployed against the presidential campaign of Donald Trump — to the point of actively trying to sabotage his administration after the election in November of 2016.

This is yuge.