There is no credible reason to believe it, yet that is exactly what Nunes, Trump and Fox are peddling. Which means that approximately 37% of the US population believes it.
Here’s the opinion of those bastions of liberal law, the Volokh Conspiracy.
Part of the problem is that judges figure that of course informants are often biased. Informants usually have ulterior motives, and judges don’t need to be told that. A helpful case is United States v. Strifler, 851 F.2d 1197, 1201 (9th Cir. 1988), in which the government obtained a warrant to search a house for a meth lab inside. Probable cause was based largely on a confidential informant who told the police that he had not only seen a meth lab in the house but had even helped others to try to manufacture meth there. The magistrate judge issued the warrant based on the informant’s detailed tip. The search was successful and charges followed.
The defendants challenged the warrant on the ground that the affidavit had failed to mention the remarkable ulterior motives of the informant. The affidavit didn’t mention that the “informant” was actually a married couple that had been in a quarrel with the defendants; that the couple was facing criminal charges themselves and had been “guaranteed by the prosecutor that they would not be prosecuted if they provided information”; and that they had been paid by the government for giving the information. The affidavit didn’t mention any of that. A big deal, right?
According to the court, no. “It would have to be a very naive magistrate who would suppose that a confidential informant would drop in off the street with such detailed evidence and not have an ulterior motive,” Judge Noonan wrote. “The magistrate would naturally have assumed that the informant was not a disinterested citizen.” The fact that the magistrate wasn’t told that the “informant” was guaranteed to go free and paid for the information didn’t matter, as “the magistrate was given reason to think the informant knew a good deal about what was going on” inside the house.
Importantly, that doesn’t mean that an informant’s bias never needs to be disclosed. It just depends on facts of the case. It depends on how important the informant’s information was to establish probable cause, and it depends on how much the alleged bias makes the information unreliable in context.
First, you need to know all of the facts claimed in the Carter Page FISA affidavit to know if disclosing the funding source of the Steele’s research was even remotely relevant. My understanding is that FISA applications like this are rarely close calls. DOJ usually gives the FISC way more than probable cause.
Second, even if the Steele research was a major part of the affidavit, whether the funding source would need to be disclosed depends on whether it critically altered the case for probable cause. Some of that would depend on whether the Steele research was corroborated. If the government looked into the Steele memorandum and corroborated some of its claims, it undercuts the need to disclose the funding source.
That’s a problem for #ReleaseTheMemo, I think. To my knowledge, Steele was not some random person motivated by an ongoing personal feud against Trump or Carter Page. To my knowledge, he was not a drug dealer facing criminal charges who was promised freedom if he could come up with something for the government’s FISA application. Instead, Steele was a former MI6 intelligence officer and Russia expert. He was hired to do opposition research because of his professional reputation, expertise and contacts. And his work was apparently taken pretty seriously by United States intelligence agencies.
I’d been waiting for the Volokh Conspiracy to weigh in on this as I although I often disagree withe libertarian/conservative policy preferences of many of the bloggers there, I do tend to respect their legal acumen, in particularly Eugene Volokh and Orin Kerr. So I’m happy to see that.
It is consistent with my view that the “legal” arguments in the Nunes memo were extremely weak and not substantially supported.
The real irony here is that while the GOP shoots themselves in the foot yet again they will suffer no backlash for it. So there’s no reason to not continue throwing mud at the wall until something sticks, even if that something is a handful of monkey poo.
Why the hell do I read these threads early enough in the morning to ruin my whole day.
Politico’s magazine has a story that will surprise no one who has been following this thread: the releasethememo hashtag was part of a sophisticated promotional campaign amplified by an army of likely Russian bots:
The analysis below, conducted by our team from the social media intelligence group New Media Frontier, shows that the #releasethememo campaign was fueled by, and likely originated from, computational propaganda. … [the hashtag’s originator] appears to be a real guy in Michigan, a battleground state … [who] has a history of tweeting about trending conservative media topics … [He] has few followers (74 at last count) and is not particularly influential. However, his account is followed by several accounts that are probable bots as well as by the verified account of the Michigan Republican Party (@MIGOP, which first used #releasethememo at 5:41 a.m. on January 19), an account that likely auto-follows other accounts that engage with it. At 4 p.m. [on January 18], one of Moraine’s followers, @KARYN19138585—an account that has the 8-digit fingerprint associated with some Russian bot accounts—responds to @underthemoraine’s tweet, saying Moraine is the first one tweeting about this breaking news topic… [A]round 6 p.m. [the hashtag is retweeted by] “Stonewall Jackson” @1776Stonewall, an anonymous account of a supposed “American history buff” who has around 50,000 followers, far more than early accounts that had been engaging in #releasethememo. … It is a “follow-back” account, so partially automated and positioned within an amplification network; it is followed by and follows many likely Russian bots, plus accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers that automatically retweet Stonewall’s content. … Use any basic analytical software to scroll through the early promoters of #releasethememo, and you’ll see most of the accounts meet basic criteria for bot/troll/cyborg suspicion. … The accounts tweeting #releasethememo immediately began to target the president (not an unusual occurrence), but also the Trumpiest of congressmen …
As depressing as the news is that our leaders seem to be controlled by bot Twitter accounts the way those zombie ants are controlled by parasites, I am at least heartened by the fact that Politico seems to finally be taking this threat seriously. For many years it was the home of “both sides are the same, except the Dems are losers” journalism. (It’s been getting better since a bunch of its core people left in 2016 to create Axios.)
Yeah, the bots went crazy on that one. It spiked by something like 400,000 percent one day, mostly by bots.
No one cares and nothing matters anymore.
I think it’s time for Twitter to shutter itself, for the good of humanity.
Aside from breathless news reporters and the idle population, does anyone really care what hashtags are trending? Or am I just a cranky old man yelling at a cloud?
If something is trending, Twitter will suggest it to you and it shows up on their main page, which usually leads to more people checking the hashtag to see what people are talking about.
If you can get to “trending,” you’re going to get a lot more eyeballs on it. And Russia knows this.
The only useful hashtag is the one nominating who’s going to die today.
And it’s not just contained to Twitter. That stuff bleeds over to other social media, like Facebook.
Twitler.
So the GOP’s strategy now is to literally defend Russian spies from being spied upon by our own intelligence services.
And mainstream news organisations tend to assume anything trending on twitter is worth reporting on.
You don’t understand, they aren’t Russian spies. The president says so.
Devin Nunes says, “as far as we can tell Papadopoulos never even had met with the President.”
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/960524111146561536/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc^tfw
Nunes is Chair of the House Intelligence Committee. That means he has the most intelligence. Therefore, the official Trump campaign photo is FAKE NEWS.