The Nunes Memo And The Right's Long Campaign To Declare Its Critics Invalid - By Definition

https://crooksandliars.com/2018/02/nunes-memo-and-rights-long-campaign

By Steve M. at Crooks and Liars

"SNIP........

You can hate Democrats if you like, but why would Democrats pay an intelligence professional large amounts of money for lies? If they wanted to attack Trump with falsehoods, they could just make them up. They wanted factual information that was detrimental to Trump. Similarly, why would Steele just make up dirt for his clients? He had a professional reputation to uphold. Both sides had a vested interest in obtaining information that was accurate.

Steele was a widely regarded spy. The FBI thought he was trustworthy. There's every reason to believe that the FISA warrant renewal was based on more than the Steele dossier (though Nunes takes great pains to conceal that fact), but there's also good reason to believe that Steele obtained real dirt.

But to Republicans, it's all invalid because it's fruit of the poison tree: the Democratic Party, which is a poison tree by definition.

There's also this in the memo:

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What the memo refers to as Steele's "bias" might just be Steele's attitude toward Trump after learning all the skeezy things he'd learned about Trump in the course of his investigations. If you're spying on Joe Blow and your espionage uncovers the fact that Blow is a bad person, does learning about Blow's deparavity mean you have bias against Blow and should no longer stay on the Blow case? That's not a standard I'd like applied to law enforcement officers investigating serial killers, rapists, terrorists, pedophiles, child pornographers, industrial polluters, Ponzi-scheme operators....




........SNIP"