Matt Taibbi makes the excellent point that if you right wingers want any classified material declassified, shouldn't you take such a request to the President?:
By all means, if the memo is important (although I doubt it) let's let the public see it. But followers of this story should also remember that if this or any classified document somehow exculpates Donald Trump on any front, he's had the power all along to declassify such information.
Why Trump hasn't done so on a number of these occasions has been one of the enduring mysteries of this affair. It's given pause to even the most hardened Russiagate skeptics.
This includes people like former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy of the National Review. McCarthy has been highly critical of the Robert Mueller investigation, but has also repeatedly wondered why Trump is not lifting the veil on some of these documents.
One of the few figures in the media to explore holes in Russiagate theories propagated by both sides, McCarthy had this to say in August:
"I can't get past a nagging question: Why must we speculate about whether the Obama administration abusively exploited its foreign-intelligence-collection powers in order to spy on Donald Trump's political campaign? After all, Trump is president now. If he was victimized, he's in a position to tell us all about it."
So #ReleaseTheMemo seems curious and disingenuous at best. But the Republicans don't have a monopoly on such behavior, either.
Recently, there's been an effort in Democrat-friendly media to walk back one of the major assumptions of #Russiagate, i.e. that the FBI's Russia investigation was spurred by either the Steele report, the case involving Carter Page, or both.
Stories have come out in both the Washington Post and the New York Times in recent weeks that appear to contradict their own earlier reports on the matter, pointing now at Mueller-target George Papadopoulos as the ostensible root of the Russia probe.
There's no conclusion to be drawn from any of this, other than that the genesis of the Russiagate investigation remains mysterious and neither party seems particularly motivated to clarify the matter for the public.
The Republicans seem anxious to keep hinting that the privately-generated Steele report was used improperly as part of a FISA warrant application, while the Trump administration keeps passing up opportunities to release what it knows about the matter. It's a bizarre stalemate that will eat up a lot of airtime, without really moving this interminable affair forward in any significant way.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/taibbi-forget-the-memo-can-we-worry-about-the-banks-w515668
#ShowTheMemo...
20 Jan '18 00:17
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