monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

But Nunes’s increasingly bizarre behavior is giving unlikely oxygen to his most prominent Democratic challenger, local prosecutor Andrew Janz, who created something of a buzz in December by erecting billboards showing the incumbent on a child leash (along with the president) held by Vladimir Putin.

More tellingly, Janz commissioned a poll from Public Policy Polling earlier this month that showed a generic Democrat within five points of Nunes (who led 50/45). The survey also suggested independents were breaking pretty heavily against the incumbent, which is exactly what a Democrat would need in this district.

As a legal matter, as law professor Orin Kerr has explained, there is no merit to the argument that a politically biased source cannot be used to obtain a warrant. Indeed, the FBI used journalism funded by Steve Bannon to investigate Hillary Clinton. In the place of any strong legal claim, the memo substitutes the assumption that intelligence sources who don’t want Trump to be president must be up to no good.

But this treats the effect as the cause. Strzok, as the context of his texts reveals, was a moderate Republican who voted for John Kasich in the GOP primary. Steele was a Brit who had not shown any strong passion for American politics. They developed intense preferences in the 2016 election outcome in large part because they had access to intelligence about Trump and Russia. They did not create this intelligence to support their political beliefs.

Indeed, Carter Page — the former Trump campaign official, the surveillance of whom occupies most of the memo’s attention — came under FBI scrutiny in 2014, after he had passed documents on to Russian spies. Page is the kind of person who would be brought on as a foreign policy adviser only if (a) the campaign was actively seeking out Russian assets, or (b) it was so slipshod it could easily be penetrated by Russian intelligence.

gotta wonder what Nunez' early retirement plan is

He never worked for the FBI, he was a British intelligence agent and he didn't get fired or have to leave under any cloud that I have heard of.

While the FISA application relied on Steele’s past record of credible reporting on other unrelated matters, it ignored or concealed his anti-Trump financial and ideological motivations.

Furthermore, Deputy Director McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 [i.e., last month] that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.

After Steele was terminated, a source validation report conducted by an independent unit within FBI assessed Steele’s reporting as only minimally corroborated.

Dat river, De Nile, seems to float lots of boats in congress.

Interesting how the usual crew here aren't too vocal today/tonight.

And the Brits speak very highly of him and his expertise in general, as well as his knowledge of Russia. The Trumpists just sling ignorant mud.

Also, Australia's top diplomat to Great Britain, Alexander Downer,

Five Eyes countries have been looking out for each other for decades.

The GOP’s wildly overhyped intelligence memo, which was designed to undercut the FBI and special counsel Robert Mueller, not only turned out to be a dud — it backfired so spectacularly that it ended up undermining the GOP’s already flimsy case against the Russia probe.

Just a few hours after its public release, the memo already represents a stunning failure on the part of Donald Trump and his Republican allies. If this erratic blueprint was supposed to act as a defensive mechanism to protect Trump from his burgeoning political and legal woes, the White House needs to find a Plan B.

Fast.

The story the White House and its radical congressional allies wanted to tell with the memo went something like this: Under President Barack Obama, the FBI became politicized and its leaders set out to destroy Trump’s 2016 campaign by using partisan intelligence to spy on Trump adviser Carter Page.

That’s the gotcha storyline the memo tries to lay out.

Yet even though the memo is just four pages long and short on specifics, those four pages are packed with so many obvious contradictions that instead of setting the narrative, the memo demolishes the GOP’s narrative.

Specifically, Republicans claim the so-called Steele dossier was central to the FBI’s surveillance of Page, and that it was the dossier that triggered the FBI to start investigating the Trump campaign. Furthermore, because the dossier was funded in part by Democrats, the GOP alleges that the FBI had an anti-Trump bias when it went to a FISA court in 2016 and asked a judge to renew the surveillance warrant already in place on Page.

From there, desperate Republicans tried to argue that because Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was involved in the FISA request, that meant he was unfit for the job, which meant Trump could remove him, which meant the White House would be able to install a new person inside the Department of Justice to oversee Mueller’s investigation — replacing Rosenstein as the top DOJ official in charge of the Russia probe.

Not only does all of that represent an astonishingly convoluted strategy, but Republicans couldn’t even pull off the first part, which was to use the memo to implicate the FBI.

First, a comprehensive FISA request would never rely solely on a single document like the dossier, which was compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele. Second, Friday’s Republican memo specifically acknowledges that the triggering event for the FBI’s Russia investigation in 2016 wasn’t the dossier, but the suspicious activities of a different Trump adviser — George Papadopoulos.

As former CIA analyst Ned Price said on Friday afternoon, “Democrats should be showering gifts on Devin Nunes for this memo because it disproves one of the key talking points: Namely that the Steele dossier was the predicate to launch the investigation into Donald Trump in the first place.”

We’ve actually known since last summer that Papadopoulos’ actions caught the FBI’s attention and ultimately led the bureau to start a counterintelligence investigation looking at the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. However, Trump and his Republican allies have tried their best to suppress this fact because it doesn’t fit into their narrative.

But now, thanks to the GOP’s wayward memo, the spotlight is now shining on the one key detail that Republicans wanted to keep in the dark.

Lock him; them, up!

With all this great transparency, surely Trump's tax report will be published soon - I obviously missed the Republicans demand to release it now.