With that said, Metcalfe said attention should be paid to whether State withholds emails citing national security or "intelligence sources and methods," as they would likely "undermine her judgement" and would be a "credibility weakness" for Clinton. "These are, after all, only what her legal team deemed 'appropriate' for inclusion to State," Metcalfe told VICE News. Related: Judge Orders State Department to Release Clinton Emails on Rolling Basisĭaniel Metcalfe, the founding director of the Justice Department's Office of Information Policy (OIP), the office that is supposed to ensure other government agencies are adhering to the attorney general's FOIA guidelines, said the public should not be too excited by the email disclosures. So, while the Democratic rebuttal to Nunes would also function as a partisan document, it is likely that any sensitive information redacted by Trump would be inculpatory.Beyond newsworthy details contained in the emails, open government advocates said they will be closely watching to see the extent of the redactions the State Department uses in the emails. The Page warrant was renewed three times. Any time a FISA warrant is renewed, law enforcement officials have to prove that their surveillance yielded actionable intelligence. But it is also likely to reveal that the bureau had good reason to surveil Page. The FISA process itself is closely guarded. The primary argument against full transparency-again, the putative reason for the Republican campaign against the F.B.I.-is that it would reveal classified sources and methods. relied on the Steele dossier, as well as any other evidence the bureau had that Page was acting as an agent of the Russian government. Releasing the actual FISA application to surveil Trump associate Carter Page would instantly clear up the extent to which the F.B.I. At its core, Memo-gate is little more than a media spectacle overlaying a political debate about classified information that Americans-and indeed, most lawmakers-don’t have access to. Gowdy isn’t wrong to argue that Schiff and his fellow Democrats have a political agenda. “Unfortunately, we are in an environment where you would include material that you know has to be redacted and you know responsible people are going to redact it just so that question will be asked.” “I think the Democrats are politically smart enough to put things in the memo that require either the or the Department of Justice to say it needs to be redacted,” Gowdy, who cut his teeth running the Benghazi and Clinton e-mail hearings, told Fox News on Tuesday night. Trey Gowdy suspects Schiff is setting up on purpose. Redacting parts of the Democratic rebuttal, of course, would play right into Schiff’s hands-an outcome Rep. to do, but redactions to remove information they think is unfavorable to the president.” That is, not redactions to protect sources or methods, which we’ve asked the Department of Justice and the F.B.I. What I’m more concerned about,” Schiff told CNN on Tuesday, “is that they make political redactions. “To say, ‘we don’t want the country to see this’ is untenable. Schiff, on the other hand, seems to be laying the groundwork to keep the mystery surrounding his counter-argument alive-and to undermine the Republican claim that Memo-gate is all about transparency. Nunes, after weeks of buildup, learned the hard way that the hype cycle turns parabolic if you can’t deliver the goods. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, appears to be outplaying Nunes at his own game. Not because it will invalidate the Nunes memo, which was declared a dud as soon as it was made public, but because Rep. Still, at least one Republican is in a state of agitation over the document. bias are being treated like the Pentagon Papers. The Democratic rebuttal is unlikely to penetrate the conservative-media ecosystem where Devin Nunes’s allegations of F.B.I. Later this week, when he finally finishes reading it, Donald Trump is expected to release House Democrats’ “pretty lengthy” 10-page response to the Nunes memo, opening a second act in a bit of political theater that has consumed Washington.
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