By: Andrew C. McCarthy – nationalreview.com – February 1, 2018

It appears very likely that President Trump is going to allow the disclosure, in some form, of the memo on alleged FISA abuse authored by majority staff of the House Intelligence Committee under the direction of Chairman Devin Nunes (R., Calif.). It could happen as early as today. As one would expect, both sides of the dispute over the memo are intensifying their pre-publication efforts to influence public reaction — as discussed here in last week’s column considering objections to the memo.

Since before the Republican-led committee voted (along partisan lines) to seek the memo’s declassification and publication, the FBI has been complaining that it was not permitted to review the memo. As I explained last week, this was a very unpersuasive complaint. Having stonewalled the committee’s information requests for several months, the Bureau and Justice Department are hardly well positioned to complain about being denied access; the committee, by contrast, has every reason to believe they would have slow-walked any review in order to delay matters further.

All that aside, the FBI was guaranteed access to the memo before its publication because of the rules of the process. Once the committee voted to disclose, that gave the president five days to object. During that five days, Trump’s own appointees at the FBI and DOJ would have the chance to pore over the memo and make their objections and policy arguments to their principal, the president, and to the rest of the Trump national-security team. This tells us the real objection was not that they were barred from reviewing the memo; it is that they were barred from reviewing it on a schedule that would make it more difficult to derail publication.

Fox News reports that FBI director Christopher Wray reviewed the memo on Capitol Hill on Sunday — before the committee even voted to release it. Subsequently, two senior FBI officials — one each from the Bureau’s counterintelligence and legal divisions — reviewed the memo and “could not point to any factual inaccuracies” in it, according to an unnamed source who spoke to Fox.

There has followed the usual gamesmanship that intensifies public cynicism about “the Swamp.” Based on their review of the memo, the FBI and committee Democrats sought some changes. Though committee Republicans did not agree that these edits were necessary, they nevertheless agreed to make them. Democrats promptly used this accommodation — which they and the FBI had requested — to argue that publication should now be withheld because the memo has been “materially” and “substantively” altered since the committee votes. Nunes counters that the edits are minor and include mere grammatical fixes. Given that the people who are complaining about the changes are the ones who insisted on them, the chairman rejects what he calls an “increasingly strange attempt to thwart publication of the memo.”

Apparently unable to cite inaccuracies, the Bureau has shifted to the objection we anticipated last week — namely, that the memo takes things out of context. The purported omission of material information, it is said, has the effect of making the memo misleading. The FBI put out a statement Wednesday asserting that it had “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”

The committee and such other informed critics as Senator Lindsey Graham have been suggesting that the FBI and Justice Department used allegations from the Steele dossier in an application for a FISA Court warrant but did not tell the judge important facts about the dossier (specifically, that the dossier was an unverified anti-Trump opposition-research project, commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign). Thus, Chairman Nunes’s hard-edged response to the FBI’s statement was what one would expect: If anyone knows about “material omissions,” it is the FBI. “It’s clear,” Nunes states, “that top officials used unverified information in a court document to fuel a counter-intelligence investigation during an American political campaign.”

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Source: Devin Nunes FISA Memo: Positioning Ahead of Its Release