Waching daily Aug 3 2018

What James Comey Told Trump Behind Closed Doors Is Bad News For Robert Mueller

The Democrats released their memo in an attempt knock down Devin Nunes' allegations of the

FBI's abuse of power in spying on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

It was their attempt to take the heat off special counsel Robert Mueller and the Russia

probe.

But what James Comey told Trump behind closed doors was bad news for Mueller.

Nunes' memo exposed the massive scandal surrounding the FBI obtaining a FISA warrant

against Page.

The FBI used the fake news Fusion GPS Russia dossier as their central evidence to obtain

a warrant to spy on Page.

Democrats – led by ranking Intelligence Committee member Adam Schiff – tried to

knock that down.

Their memo claimed the dossier was corroborated by multiple sources, but that just isn't

true.

When former FBI Director James Comey briefed President-elect Trump about the dossier last

January, he described it as "salacious and unverified."

Fox News reports:

"The new memo also asserted that the dossier had been corroborated by multiple sources.

However, in June 2017 testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, former FBI Director

James Comey said the opposite — that three months after the warrant on Page had been

granted he still considered the dossier "unverified" and "salacious" when he briefed incoming

President Trump in January 2017 at Trump Tower."

FBI officials had also previously testified before the House Intelligence Committee and

stated they have not been able to corroborate the dossier's allegations of collusion.

All of this is bad news for Robert Mueller.

The dossier was the central piece of evidence that drove the collusion story.

National Review's Andrew McCarthy points out that even though the FBI claims minor

Trump advisor George Papadopoulos' drunken conversation with an Australian diplomat kicked

off the probe, the FBI did not interview him until six months after the investigation started

and that they obtained a FISA warrant against Page and not Papadopoulos.

He writes:

"Schiff is determined to run with the implausible story that George Papadopoulos is the face

that launched a thousand ships — that Papadopoulos's boozy conversation with an Australian diplomat,

not the Steele dossier's allegations of a traitorous Trump–Russia conspiracy, was

the true impetus for the counterintelligence investigation.

Schiff maintains that the FBI was therefore not even paying attention to Steele until

long after the Papadopoulos information came in.

That is, even though the Bureau started receiving Steele's reports in July 2016, they did

not make their way to the FBI's "closely held investigative team" for some seven

weeks — i.e., until mid September.

This team is described elsewhere (p. 3) in the Schiff memo as "the counterintelligence

team investigating Russia at FBI headquarters."

Of course, by mid September, Steele and Fusion GPS were leaking Steele's allegations to

many favored reporters, so perhaps Schiff is saying that the "closely held investigative

team" read about them in the news.

It is, in any event, a frivolous point.

The fact that the Bureau administratively opened a case on Papadopoulos does not mean

that much of anything was done on it.

As we know, investigators did not even interview Papadopoulos until late January 2017, after

Trump had already taken office and about six months after they received the info about

Papadopoulos.

By contrast, once the "closely held investigative team" got the Steele dossier, the FBI and

the DOJ were at the FISA court's doorstep tout de suite.

And to repeat, they got a surveillance warrant for Page, not Papadopoulos."

The Democrats' memo landed with a thud.

It failed to pick apart any of the allegations made by Chairman Nunes.

We will keep you up to date on any new developments in this story.

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