four page memo released friday reports the disturbing fact about how the fbi and fisa appear to have been used to influence the 2016 election and its aftermath. the fbi failed to inform the fisa court that the clinton campaign had funded the dossier. your reaction? well, i think it is pretty clear from the memo and information that we have received that the fbi did fail to advise the fisa court about the origins of that dossier. and again i will state, the fbi director, deputy director and the department of justice, attorney general, deputy attorney general had to certify what s in those fisa warrants. they are responsible for it. they are responsible for the content in saying it is truthful and accurate and complete. if you fail to disclose information that s relevant, it is in fact providing information that s false. julie: yeah, false information. and then somehow obtaining a warrant. that normally doesn t fly in the criminal system, so then why did it happen in washington? that i
fbi abused its surveillance powers in the russia investigation. now, democrats call the memo deliberately misleading and in an attempt to harm the mueller investigation. and for his part, president trump says the memo, quote, totally vindicates him. so for more on this, let s get to molly henneberg with more. this is phase one of congress s investigation. this is the first memo. according to republican congressman nunes, the house intelligence committee chairman, and it focuses on why the secret fisa court approved a warrant allowing the fbi to spy on a former trump advisor. the fbi opened a counterintelligence investigation into the trump campaign in the summer of 2016. that s what happened. and then they got a warrant on someone in the trump campaign, using opposition research, paid for by the democratic party and the hilary clinton campaign. that s what this is about.
christopher steele? that s the interesting thing, and i think it s because and this is, you know, been in the criticism that we have seen thus far, it s only 3 1/2 inpages 1/2 pages, 4 pages pretty sparse on details. that could have bolstered nunes argument is giving a little bit more detail; right? some more information about the underlying documents or some of its research and pointing to explicit ways that he was biassed against trump instead of referring to this nebulous dossier that people are still kind of confused about. julie: earlier today james comey the former fbi director basically said that s it underplaying the significance of this memo. this is so significant because it obviously highlights the glaring problems within the abuse, the fisa abuse and why doesn t this memo address or even talk about the fact that u.s. intelligence agencies that collect info for fisa in the future need to change? this cannot happen again. it also begs the question, will
and it s wrong. it should never be done. that someone is carter page. the memo says the fisa court gave the okay to the fbi to spy on him, based in large part on material collected by former british spy christopher steele. he was paid $160,000 by the democratic national committee and the hilary clinton campaign via a law firm and a research firm to dig up dirt on trump s ties to russia. the memo says, quote, neither the initial application to surveil page they are talking about there in october 2016 nor any of the renewals disclose or reference the role of the dnc, clinton campaign or any party or campaign in funding steele s efforts. even though the political origins of the steele dossier were then known to senior doj and fbi officials. democrats dispute the significance of the steele dossier and say it was not the basis for the warrant being
dossier was all they needed to issue a surveillance warrant, which clearly was a big screw-up. what more did we learn? so we also learned that that is one part of it, right, the dossier is one part of it. the interesting thing about the memo is it revealed the problems of the fisa application process but some of the other questions left unanswered are what are the issues for that and are their solutions for how we fix this moving forward? if republicans or anyone is unhappy with this application process, how will we move forward with it? you mentioned christopher steele. this memo also made explicit his antitrump biases which he is a human being of course he will have political opinions but the question now is whether not only was his information politically bias but was it inaccurate which i think is the bigger problem. julie: there s a sentence in the last paragraph that i want you