Responding to a Freedom of Information Act request, the government has now released the heavily-redacted FISA application requesting a warrant against Donald Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, suspected by the FBI as acting as "an agent of a foreign power." For much of this year, House Republicans had demonized the FBI's efforts to investigate Page's actions during the campaign as a witch hunt; that demonization was premised around a "memo" by Rep. Devin Nunes purporting to summarize the still-classified document as a partisan-laced, spuriously sourced attempt by the FBI to infiltrate the Trump team's ranks in order to snoop around for Russia connections they oughtn't to have been looking for in the first place.
Now that the (heavily redacted) documents are out for all to read, it's evident that Rep. Nunes simply lied about their contents, and lied brazenly. David Kris:
I said then, and I still believe, that the “Nunes memo was dishonest. And if it is allowed to stand, we risk significant collateral damage to essential elements of our democracy.”
Now we have some additional information in the form of the redacted FISA applications themselves, and the Nunes memo looks even worse.
Many of Nunes' most salacious claims about the investigation into Page, repeated ad nauseum by a cadre of other House Republicans and quickly taken up as arguments by the White House itself, are amply debunked by the released documents.
