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Schiff accuses Nunes of making secret changes to classified memo

Rep. Devin Nunes “secretly altered” a classified and controversial memo about secret surveillance during the 2016 presidential campaign before he sent it to the White House for review, Rep. Adam Schiff said on Wednesday night.

A spokesman for Nunes (R-Tulare), who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said the adjustments were only “minor edits” and brushed off the accusation from Schiff (D-Burbank), the panel’s ranking Democrat.

In a letter to Nunes, Schiff wrote that “material changes” were made to the four-page document that members of Congress were able to read before the GOP-led House Intelligence Committee voted along party lines Monday to release it.

Trite Gowdy has announced he will not seek reelection, DRINKS ARE ON ME

Late last year, Tom Nichols, a professor at the Naval War College and a NeverTrump conservative, proposed a little thought experiment for Republicans skeptical of Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s Russia ties.

“Let’s play Alternate Universe,” he wrote on Twitter. “It’s 2017, and President Hillary Clinton is facing charges that Chelsea met with Russians who offered oppo on Trump. Chelsea didn’t call the FBI; and Clinton nat sec adviser Jake Sullivan lied to the FBI about talking to the Russians.”

Nichols laid out the unfolding drama over a series of tweets. President Clinton fires the F.B.I. director after he declines her request to “let it go” on Sullivan. “Then, at least three other Clinton campaign officials end up indicted. All of them are tied in some way to a hostile foreign power.” Later, she threatens to “yank FOX’s license” because she didn’t like its critical coverage.

“I’m sure … totally sure …” Nichols added with no little irony, “that stalwarts of the G.O.P. would say: Look, this is a nothingburger, you can’t define ‘collusion,’ it’s just ‘the coffee boy,’ and on and on.”

I’m reminded of Nichols’ astute tweets as the Republican campaign against the Russia investigation kicked into higher gear this week.

At the State of the Union on Tuesday night, Trump was overheard telling Representative Jeff Duncan, Republican of South Carolina, that he was “100 percent” committed to releasing House Committee Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes’s secret memo on the Russia investigation, over fierce F.B.I. objections regarding “material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”

Next there was the ahead-of-schedule departure of Deputy F.B.I. Director Andrew McCabe after relentless public criticism from Trump. McCabe was politically suspect because his wife, a Democrat, made a failed bid in 2015 for the Virginia State Senate and had received money from then-Gov. (and Clinton ally) Terry McAuliffe’s political-action committee.

And finally there was House Speaker Paul Ryan, who on Tuesday supported the release of the Nunes memo to “clean up” the F.B.I. If the administration and its supporters get their way, the “cleaning” would also claim Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller and apparently approved the continued surveillance of the former Trump campaign adviser and Vladimir Putin fan Carter Page.

Altogether, this is supposed to tell the tale of deep state collusion against our elected leader. So let’s play Alternate Universe again, and bring Nichols’ scenarios up-to-date.

Imagine that President Hillary Clinton had agreed to release a partisan Democratic intelligence memo over the objections of Republicans in Congress and her own top F.B.I. officials that disclosure could harm national security.

Would conservative pundits and politicians:

(a) Praise President Clinton for abandoning her old habits of secrecy and standing strong on the side of transparency in government?

(b) Call for her impeachment on grounds that she had compromised national security for shamelessly self-serving political reasons?

Imagine, next, that the Clinton campaign had named as a foreign policy adviser a little known figure with scanty business or academic credentials but with strongly pro-Putin views and curious links to senior Russian officials. Imagine that this same adviser later testified to Congress that the Clinton campaign had asked him to sign a nondisclosure agreement after a trip he took to Russia during the height of the campaign. Imagine also that senior Clinton campaign officials at first denied and later had their memories “refreshed” about knowing him.

Would conservative pundits and politicians:

(a) Agree with Clinton administration spokespersons that, while the campaign had named him as an adviser, he had no role in anything and that his links to Russia were purely incidental?

(b) Agree with Democrats in Congress that the F.B.I. had no business whatsoever in surveilling him because a political dossier might have served as one basis of suspicion, and that his civil liberties had been seriously traduced?

(c) Note that his presence on the campaign was of a piece with Clinton’s disastrous “reset” of relations with Russia under the Obama administration, and that it suggested a policy of appeasing the Kremlin at America’s expense?

Imagine, finally, that after firing James Comey for insufficient loyalty, President Clinton had asked the deputy director of the F.B.I. how he had voted in the election in an Oval Office meeting. Imagine that after learning that he hadn’t voted, she unleashed a campaign of public invective and belittlement aimed at his wife for having once run for state office as a Republican. Imagine, in this same connection, that the effort to oust the deputy director was only a warm-up to getting rid of the deputy attorney general, a well-regarded, straight-shooting Democrat who had appointed the special counsel looking into Clinton’s Russia ties.

Would conservative pundits and politicians:

(a) Applaud President Clinton for taking a belated but necessary step to clean up a “politicized” Justice Department that had interfered against her at the end of the campaign, while also agreeing that the party affiliation of an F.B.I. official’s spouse is a legitimate basis to suspect the official of disloyalty and partisan motives?

(b) Cast aspersions on the deputy attorney general for defending the work of the special counsel against the wishes of the president?

(c) Accuse the president of obstructing justice by smearing and effectively ousting upstanding public servants whose only sin was to do their jobs to the best of their abilities while, in one case, being married to a woman with political ambitions?

In this same alternative universe, I’d be writing columns calling for further investigations of a manifestly corrupt Clinton administration, and even raising the subject of impeachment. I know because I was there for the prequel, back in 1998. At least some of the conservatives who railed against Bill Clinton then could claim they were acting on principles that went beyond pure partisanship.

These days, not so much.

The chairman of Illinois’s Lottery Control Board and a member of the state’s Republican Central Committee has resigned both positions after taking heavy criticism for describing East. St. Louis, Ill., as the “shithole of the universe!”

Blair Garber deployed the term on Twitter in response to a tweet by country singer Charlie Daniels, who was defending Trump’s reference to Haiti and African countries as “shitholes” and criticizing Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) for taking offense.

“Mr. Durbin,” Daniels tweeted, “I’m so sorry that your virgin ears were blistered by the absolutely horrible language president Trump used in front of you. The president actually thought he was addressing a meeting of members of congress, not a kindergarten class …”

Daniels’ tweet provoked a swell of approving comments, one of them from Garber, according to the State Journal-Register, which broke the story.

“Charlie,” Garber wrote, Durbin’s home town is (get this) east St. Louis Illinois! The shithole of the universe! Just do a google search.”

Garber’s tweet is no longer available.

On Wednesday, a spokeswoman for Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner (D) said he had accepted Garber’s resignation from the lottery board, along with an apology, the Journal-Register and other news outlets reported. He also resigned from the Republican State Central Committee, according to CBS Chicago.

“It was an unfortunate choice of words, and I’m sorry for any consternation it caused,” Garber told WBBM. Garber is from the prosperous city of Evanston, just north of Chicago, according to CBS Chicago. He has described himself as a Trump admirer.

East St. Louis, a city of about 32,000 just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Mo., is a predominantly African American community where roughly 44 percent of the population lives below the poverty level. Once a thriving industrial town, it began a downward economic spiral in the 1960s as businesses and residents exited and unemployment skyrocketed.

East St. Louis has been trying to make a comeback ever since, with modest success.

In addition to being Durbin’s birthplace, East St. Louis has been home to singer Tina Turner, jazz great Miles Davis, tennis champion Jimmy Connors and Olympic Gold medalist Jackie-Joyner Kersee.

@maporsche,
I can't account for your cognitive deficits, but please spare me your woke pomposity

The use of excessive force and the abuse of police power is as old as police. It doesn't just affect blacks, the problem is much broader than that

President Donald Trump on Thursday morning incorrectly claimed that his state of the union speech on Tuesday was the most-watched in history.

In a tweet praising Fox News’ coverage of his speech, Trump boasted that 45.6 million people watched his speech on television, claiming that it was the “highest number in history.”

Quote:

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Thank you for all of the nice compliments and reviews on the State of the Union speech. 45.6 million people watched, the highest number in history. @FoxNews beat every other Network, for the first time ever, with 11.7 million people tuning in. Delivered from the heart!
4:02 AM - Feb 1, 2018

However, 48 million viewers tuned in to President Barack Obama’s first state of the union address in 2010. Trump’s speech also trailed President Bill Clinton’s first state of the union speech and President George W. Bush’s first state of the union.