Yes, but how? By leaking to the media had doing the investigation there? And should someone who served on the Trump transition team, working closely with the people who are now being investigated, be in charge of the House Intelligence Committee in the first place?haithabu wrote:You ask whether you should trust your elected representatives who have been given oversight over the intelligence community as against the intelligence community itself?
In a democracy there is only one proper answer to that question.
The people in Congress who have the security clearance to do this should definitely be investigating the claims of the Nunez memo. Only two people on that particular committee are able to look at the documents to see if those claims are true, and one of them says they are not.
Richard Burr, a Republican who is the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is one of these people. Nunez refused to share the memo with him before making it public. The same thing happened last July.
So the chair of the Senate committee responsible for overseeing this process said that Nunez made this stuff up a year ago said that he was making things up - and that he recklessly revealed the identities of Americans mentioned in intelligence reports. And here's what happened next.Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) pointed to his House counterpart Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) for the narrative that former national security adviser Susan Rice improperly "unmasked" or revealed the identities of Americans swept up in intelligence reports.
"The unmasking thing was all created by Devin Nunes, and I'll wait to go through our full evaluation to see if there was anything improper that happened," Burr told CNN in comments reported after his committee interviewed Rice in a closed session on Friday.
"But clearly there were individuals unmasked. Some of that became public which it's not supposed to, and our business is to understand that, and explain it."
And people on the House Intelligence Committee did not know that Nunez was working with White House officials at the time.It was later revealed that two White House officials helped provide Nunes with the intelligence reports, which he viewed on White House property.
Nunes recused himself in April from his committee's ongoing investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 election and possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
This year, the Senate Intelligence Chairman, Republican Richard Burr, tells us that Nunez refused to share the memo with him before sending it to the president. The only other member of the House Intelligence Committee who can actually read the underlying intelligence says that the memo is misleading, and that it is leaking intelligence for purely partisan gain. John McCain, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, says this:
So yes, congressional oversight of the process is essential, but if the president is being investigated, not oversight by someone from the president's transition team who was publicly reprimanded by the people who do congressional oversight a year ago.John McCain wrote:In 2016, the Russian government engaged in an elaborate plot to interfere in an American election and undermine our democracy. Russia employed the same tactics it has used to influence elections around the world, from France and Germany to Ukraine, Montenegro, and beyond. Putin’s regime launched cyberattacks and spread disinformation with the goal of sowing chaos and weakening faith in our institutions. And while we have no evidence that these efforts affected the outcome of our election, I fear they succeeded in fueling political discord and dividing us from one another.
The latest attacks on the FBI and Department of Justice serve no American interests – no party’s, no president’s, only Putin’s. The American people deserve to know all of the facts surrounding Russia’s ongoing efforts to subvert our democracy, which is why Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation must proceed unimpeded. Our nation’s elected officials, including the president, must stop looking at this investigation through the warped lens of politics and manufacturing partisan sideshows. If we continue to undermine our own rule of law, we are doing Putin’s job for him.
I don't think the FBI has been resisting congressional oversight. The memo that Nunez released will be evaluated, just as the one he released a year ago was evaluated. The general public does not have access to the FISA filings and has no way of knowing whether the claims in the memo are true. The people responsible for congressional oversight do.haithabu wrote:As I said earlier, we need much more disclosure and transparency in this whole matter. The FBI has not impressed me with its active opposition to the process.