SOTM Podcast - The Russia Investigations: 5 Takeaways About The Inescapable Nunes Memo (PART 2)
We left off by commenting on Ewing's introduction and his first "takeaway" from the House Intel Committee memo. What we noticed was the use of inflammatory language being used as emotional triggers along with a very careful selection of facts from the memo all rounded under an unconscious appeal to familiar ties through partisan political commentary on a non-partisan political topic.
What we're going to continue to see throughout this article is some very carefully written material that's aimed to distract from the main aim of the memo while also subtly injecting various emotional triggers to persuade the reader into viewing the issue through a partisan lense.
Let's begin by moving to what Ewing has listed as the second takeaway. For this section, I'm going to most likely have to go sentence by sentence in order to completely dissect everything that's going on here, but anyways let's get after it and have a little fun while we can:
The title of this second takeaway, "Two consecutive administrations believed Carter Page worthy of foreign-intelligence monitoring," is an immediate straw man. The complicated thing about Ewing's article is that he is writing it as if he were explaining to us the details, but in reality he is actually trying to make an argument for what he believes is true and dismiss other aspects of the memo. The second point, in this regards, is a straw man argument.
This goes back to the use of partisan political commentary to persuade the readers into reverting to their appeal to familiarity within the party. Ewing wants us to interpret the memo as a Republican attack on the FBI, and as we discussed in the previous episode of this podcast, this interpretation doesn't make logical sense. The FBI and DOJ are not by any means allowed to hold any sort of political stance, and to suggest that the Republicans are using partisan tactics against the FBI is to suggest that the FBI is somehow involved with some political affiliation, in this case the political affiliation being with the Democrats.
This sentiment further degrades with the understanding that the memo was not written by the Republicans to attack the FBI. The memo was written by a few members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to illuminate illegal activities committed by a few members of the FBI, DOJ, and FISC. This is a common problem in modern day journalism; to suggest that some members of an intelligence community have committed a crime and to suggest that the entire FBI, DOJ, and FISC are complicit with the crime is not the same suggestion. It's an oversimplification of the issue, and it's a debate tactic employed either out of ignorance of the topic of discussion or out of a malevolent intention to mislead the reader.
The first paragraph of Ewing's second takeaway is providing to the reader some context about Carter Page and the reasoning behind the FBI's motivation for obtaining a FISA warrant for his surveillance. There's not much to say about the paragraph in regards to its methods of persuasion except for the first sentence, "Carter Page, like Papadopoulos, was a junior foreign policy adviser to the Trump 2016 campaign." Do you remember the title of the first takeaway? It was, "The Steele dossier did not launch the DOJ Russia investigation. George Papadopoulos did."
Ewing has already labelled Papadopoulos as a criminal actor and a key point of evidence for the Russian Collusion probe. By comparing Page to an already arrested member of Trump's campaign, Ewing is trying to have his readers subconsciously associate Page with someone who has already been deemed guilty, which is still a way of providing a straw man argument due to the fact that Papadopoulos was only found guilty for falsifying information to the FBI during an interrogation. Even though Papadopoulos' arrest has essentially provided no evidence supporting the Russian Collusion investigation, Ewing is still using this fact to state that Papadopoulos is bad, and Page is like Papadopoulos.
Let's move on to the second paragraph, because it's very tricky. It begins by saying, "Republicans say [that the FBI and the Justice Department used unverified material in the Steele dossier to ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court to authorize surveillance of Page] is the real problem here. In their telling, biased investigators didn't tell the court the dossier material was unproven political opposition research that had been funded by Democrats." There are several key factors to take note of in these two sentences. To begin, the first sentence starts off with the suggestion that Republicans are the ones who are making the claims in the memo. As we have discussed before, this is another straw man in the form of appealing to familiarity through partisan political commentary.
It's important to continuously recognize this appeal to partisan politics because it's used to constantly remind the reader that it is Republicans versus Democrats, and not House Intelligence Committee members versus select members of the intelligence community. The second sentence starts with the prepositional phrase, "In their telling," which is used to define the content of the memo as some sort of story formulated by the entire Republican National Committee. We know that this is not the case due to the fact that when the memo was initially written and proposed as a topic of discussion, it was a highly classified document that only the most senior members of the House Intelligence Committee were granted access to.
Let's continue with our analysis; the second paragraph of the second takeaway continues on by saying "But the memo doesn't say whether there might have been other evidence beyond the dossier — foreign intelligence intercepts or reporting from human sources — that also supported the warrant request." This is once again another straw man. Ewing has already implied that the Republicans are suggesting that the "real issue" is that of whether or not the dossier used for obtaining Page's FISA warrant was verifiable, truthful evidence.
If the Steele Dossier is able to be categorized as false, then whoever within the investigation was aware of the dossier's integrity but still used it as a statement of fact is guilty of using falsified evidence in the federal court of law, which is a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. To further describe the importance of this detail, the federal law states that if the falsified statements have been used in a matter pertaining to international or domestic terrorism, that prison sentence can be increased to an eight year maximum.
The law pertaining to falsified information is found in the US legal code in Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 47, Section 1001, Subsection (a), and it reads as such;
The word "false" has a complicated legal definition. It can be used to describe a piece of information that has been purposefully created with the intention to mislead, but it can also be used to describe a piece of information that has been concealed with the intention to mislead. The term "False" is also used to describe groundless, unsubstantiated, or unverifiable information or claims. When we consider the use of the Steele Dossier in the FISA application, we need to understand that the content of the dossier is by definition unverifiable by nature, and in its use for the FISA application, specific information about the Dossier's creation was concealed for some reason.
I'm sure you're wondering "well why would any of this matter if the FBI was able to supply other information that was truthful, apolitical, and substantiated in the FISA application?" Well, let's get to the bottom of this. The Steele Dossier is a summary of a group of groundless claims against Donald Trump and his campaign that was funded by the DNC and by the Clinton Campaign as a part of their opposition research. If the information was funded for opposition research, then that means it has strong political bias in its content and intent of use. If it is unverifiable or groundless in its accusations, then it is false information and not usable in a court of law. Not only is the information false based solely off of its groundless content, the concealment of its political bias also further falsifies its use as evidence which further indicates that its use in the FISC is criminal in its nature.
If using the Steele dossier is criminal, then everybody who knew of its origin and its invalidity is complicit in the provision and use of false information in the court of law. The members of the FBI and DOJ who knew of the origin of the dossier are complicit, and the FISC judges, who Ewing has reported as being knowledgeable of the dossier's creation, are also complicit. Whether or not there was substantiated evidence to suggest that Carter Page was involved in an act of collusion with the Russian Government being given with the initial FISA warrant application is an irrelevant piece of information when regarding the content of the House Intelligence Committee's memo. What the memo focuses on is that the use of the dossier and the concealment of specific information about the dossier is a criminal act.
We do not know for certain whether or not the President and his campaign officials were in collusion with the Russian government to affect the presidential election. What we do know for a fact is that the DNC and the Clinton Campaign paid an organization called Fusion GPS who paid a man named Christopher Steele to speak with Russian officials, obtain information from said Russian officials, and then that information made its way to the FBI who used the unsubstantiated information as evidence to electronically surveil Carter Page and any individual whom he had been in or was currently in contact with.
Now let's move on to the third paragraph of Ewing's second takeaway, which reads as such;
I'm sure that at this point, you all, my wonderful audience, are getting slightly frustrated with the level of detail that I go into when discussing and analyzing these articles. Believe me, I get frustrated as well. In fact, I think it's one of the most difficult and challenging things about being a free, independent thinker in our great country. Although I am analyzing what I believe to be a left-wing reporter's interpretation of a memo (and not only that but I'm also grilling into it rather harshly), I find this sort of journalistic integrity with any kind of politically biased news source.
Political journalists don't tell you what you need to know. They tell you what they want you to know. Since we all have our own, individual political agenda, we always tend to revolve around journalists who share our own political agenda. In this aspect, these journalists only tell us what we want to know because we want what they want. I believe that journalists have become very, very good at persuading readers into believing what they want their readers to believe because they have found a way to manipulate this natural attraction people have to like-minded political thinkers. They are able to subtly convince their readers into believing that what the journalist wants you to know is what you want to know.
They do this by starting off each article with an exposition of a plot. It's really similar to how an author writes a novel; they set the scene for you. They create the world that they want you to believe is true, and they do so by employing the same writing techniques that a novelist would use. Think about the exposition of this article; it uses elegant and emotional descriptors to put into place a scene that may or may not happened. Ewing says that the memo caused hyperpartisan tension, but the memo ended up flopping in its significance. Isn't that odd? A large amount of politicians made claims that they read the memo and said it was one of the most damning, threatening, and important pieces of literature in our nation's history, and the day it was released, it turned out to be nothing that important. Really? So Democrats said it was a great danger to our nation after they read it, and now that it's released, it's a "nothingburger?"
And who decided that it was nothing? Republicans? Democrats? The Mainstream Media? or possibly Philip Ewing himself is so knowledgeable about the matter that he can promise to us that it's not important while at the same time detail the importance of the memo to us simpletons. It's all incredibly fascinating.
Thank you for taking the time out of your day to read or listen to the State of the Media Podcast. Next week I'll most likely change to a different article since I'm becoming bored of this one and it's analysis has become far more indulgent than I had originally intended. If you like this sort of content, please leave a comment or send me an email on how I can better improve the production of this podcast or if you have any suggestions on topics I should discuss or articles I should analyze. Thanks, and hope to see you all again next week.
What we're going to continue to see throughout this article is some very carefully written material that's aimed to distract from the main aim of the memo while also subtly injecting various emotional triggers to persuade the reader into viewing the issue through a partisan lense.
Let's begin by moving to what Ewing has listed as the second takeaway. For this section, I'm going to most likely have to go sentence by sentence in order to completely dissect everything that's going on here, but anyways let's get after it and have a little fun while we can:
"2. Two consecutive administrations believed Carter Page worthy of foreign-intelligence monitoring
Carter Page, like Papadopoulos, was a junior foreign policy adviser to the Trump 2016 campaign. He visited Russia at least twice in 2016 and acknowledged in an earlier interview with the House Intelligence Committee that he had met with government officials and others there. The core of the memo is that the FBI and the Justice Department used unverified material in the Steele dossier to ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court to authorize surveillance of Page.
Republicans say that is the real problem here. In their telling, biased investigators didn't tell the court the dossier material was unproven political opposition research that had been funded by Democrats. But the memo doesn't say whether there might have been other evidence beyond the dossier — foreign intelligence intercepts or reporting from human sources — that also supported the warrant request. (And Friday night, The Washington Post reported that the FISA court "was aware that some of the information underpinning the warrant request was paid for by a political entity, although the application did not specifically name the Democratic National Committee or the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign," according to two U.S. officials.)"
The Nunes memo also doesn't say that the FISA court requires that a warrant produce intelligence in order to reauthorize it. So however the FBI got its initial warrant for Page, the Nunes memo suggests that once surveillance of Page started, it continued producing foreign intelligence.
Officials from FBI Director James Comey in 2016 to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein — who was appointed by Trump and still serves in the Trump administration — have signed successive applications for warrants, the memo says."So, as you can see, this point, along with the entirety of the article, is taking a rather weird stance with its interpretation of the memo's content. On one hand, Ewing seems inclined to believe that the information presented is not true or in some ways misleading and misrepresentative. On the other hand, there are these "takeaways," or these things that Ewing has decided are true and that he's willing to teach to us. When it comes to any of the other information in the memo, Ewing is pretty much trying to prove it all wrong.
The title of this second takeaway, "Two consecutive administrations believed Carter Page worthy of foreign-intelligence monitoring," is an immediate straw man. The complicated thing about Ewing's article is that he is writing it as if he were explaining to us the details, but in reality he is actually trying to make an argument for what he believes is true and dismiss other aspects of the memo. The second point, in this regards, is a straw man argument.
This goes back to the use of partisan political commentary to persuade the readers into reverting to their appeal to familiarity within the party. Ewing wants us to interpret the memo as a Republican attack on the FBI, and as we discussed in the previous episode of this podcast, this interpretation doesn't make logical sense. The FBI and DOJ are not by any means allowed to hold any sort of political stance, and to suggest that the Republicans are using partisan tactics against the FBI is to suggest that the FBI is somehow involved with some political affiliation, in this case the political affiliation being with the Democrats.
This sentiment further degrades with the understanding that the memo was not written by the Republicans to attack the FBI. The memo was written by a few members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to illuminate illegal activities committed by a few members of the FBI, DOJ, and FISC. This is a common problem in modern day journalism; to suggest that some members of an intelligence community have committed a crime and to suggest that the entire FBI, DOJ, and FISC are complicit with the crime is not the same suggestion. It's an oversimplification of the issue, and it's a debate tactic employed either out of ignorance of the topic of discussion or out of a malevolent intention to mislead the reader.
The first paragraph of Ewing's second takeaway is providing to the reader some context about Carter Page and the reasoning behind the FBI's motivation for obtaining a FISA warrant for his surveillance. There's not much to say about the paragraph in regards to its methods of persuasion except for the first sentence, "Carter Page, like Papadopoulos, was a junior foreign policy adviser to the Trump 2016 campaign." Do you remember the title of the first takeaway? It was, "The Steele dossier did not launch the DOJ Russia investigation. George Papadopoulos did."
Ewing has already labelled Papadopoulos as a criminal actor and a key point of evidence for the Russian Collusion probe. By comparing Page to an already arrested member of Trump's campaign, Ewing is trying to have his readers subconsciously associate Page with someone who has already been deemed guilty, which is still a way of providing a straw man argument due to the fact that Papadopoulos was only found guilty for falsifying information to the FBI during an interrogation. Even though Papadopoulos' arrest has essentially provided no evidence supporting the Russian Collusion investigation, Ewing is still using this fact to state that Papadopoulos is bad, and Page is like Papadopoulos.
Let's move on to the second paragraph, because it's very tricky. It begins by saying, "Republicans say [that the FBI and the Justice Department used unverified material in the Steele dossier to ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court to authorize surveillance of Page] is the real problem here. In their telling, biased investigators didn't tell the court the dossier material was unproven political opposition research that had been funded by Democrats." There are several key factors to take note of in these two sentences. To begin, the first sentence starts off with the suggestion that Republicans are the ones who are making the claims in the memo. As we have discussed before, this is another straw man in the form of appealing to familiarity through partisan political commentary.
It's important to continuously recognize this appeal to partisan politics because it's used to constantly remind the reader that it is Republicans versus Democrats, and not House Intelligence Committee members versus select members of the intelligence community. The second sentence starts with the prepositional phrase, "In their telling," which is used to define the content of the memo as some sort of story formulated by the entire Republican National Committee. We know that this is not the case due to the fact that when the memo was initially written and proposed as a topic of discussion, it was a highly classified document that only the most senior members of the House Intelligence Committee were granted access to.
Let's continue with our analysis; the second paragraph of the second takeaway continues on by saying "But the memo doesn't say whether there might have been other evidence beyond the dossier — foreign intelligence intercepts or reporting from human sources — that also supported the warrant request." This is once again another straw man. Ewing has already implied that the Republicans are suggesting that the "real issue" is that of whether or not the dossier used for obtaining Page's FISA warrant was verifiable, truthful evidence.
If the Steele Dossier is able to be categorized as false, then whoever within the investigation was aware of the dossier's integrity but still used it as a statement of fact is guilty of using falsified evidence in the federal court of law, which is a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. To further describe the importance of this detail, the federal law states that if the falsified statements have been used in a matter pertaining to international or domestic terrorism, that prison sentence can be increased to an eight year maximum.
The law pertaining to falsified information is found in the US legal code in Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 47, Section 1001, Subsection (a), and it reads as such;
"(a) Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully—
(1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact;
(2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or
(3) makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry;
shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism (as defined in section 2331), imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both. "So how do we apply this to the issue of the Steele dossier? Well, as we know, both the FBI and the FISC knew that the Dossier was the result of a political opposition research campaign funded by the Democratic National Convention and the Hillary Clinton Presidential Campaign. The DNC and Clinton campaign funded Fusion GPS, a company that works with the FBI for private investigation resources and with the DNC for political opposition research, who then employed Christopher Steele, a former British spy who has contact with the FBI. The damning aspect of all of this is that since the Dossier was initially funded for the sole purpose of political opposition research during the presidential campaign the information provided must be interpreted with the understanding of a strong underlying political bias; furthermore, the information is only verifiable through the integrity of Christopher Steele's name since the dossier is at its core nothing more than a witness testimony in writing from a British private citizen.
The word "false" has a complicated legal definition. It can be used to describe a piece of information that has been purposefully created with the intention to mislead, but it can also be used to describe a piece of information that has been concealed with the intention to mislead. The term "False" is also used to describe groundless, unsubstantiated, or unverifiable information or claims. When we consider the use of the Steele Dossier in the FISA application, we need to understand that the content of the dossier is by definition unverifiable by nature, and in its use for the FISA application, specific information about the Dossier's creation was concealed for some reason.
I'm sure you're wondering "well why would any of this matter if the FBI was able to supply other information that was truthful, apolitical, and substantiated in the FISA application?" Well, let's get to the bottom of this. The Steele Dossier is a summary of a group of groundless claims against Donald Trump and his campaign that was funded by the DNC and by the Clinton Campaign as a part of their opposition research. If the information was funded for opposition research, then that means it has strong political bias in its content and intent of use. If it is unverifiable or groundless in its accusations, then it is false information and not usable in a court of law. Not only is the information false based solely off of its groundless content, the concealment of its political bias also further falsifies its use as evidence which further indicates that its use in the FISC is criminal in its nature.
If using the Steele dossier is criminal, then everybody who knew of its origin and its invalidity is complicit in the provision and use of false information in the court of law. The members of the FBI and DOJ who knew of the origin of the dossier are complicit, and the FISC judges, who Ewing has reported as being knowledgeable of the dossier's creation, are also complicit. Whether or not there was substantiated evidence to suggest that Carter Page was involved in an act of collusion with the Russian Government being given with the initial FISA warrant application is an irrelevant piece of information when regarding the content of the House Intelligence Committee's memo. What the memo focuses on is that the use of the dossier and the concealment of specific information about the dossier is a criminal act.
We do not know for certain whether or not the President and his campaign officials were in collusion with the Russian government to affect the presidential election. What we do know for a fact is that the DNC and the Clinton Campaign paid an organization called Fusion GPS who paid a man named Christopher Steele to speak with Russian officials, obtain information from said Russian officials, and then that information made its way to the FBI who used the unsubstantiated information as evidence to electronically surveil Carter Page and any individual whom he had been in or was currently in contact with.
Now let's move on to the third paragraph of Ewing's second takeaway, which reads as such;
"The Nunes memo also doesn't say that the FISA court requires that a warrant produce intelligence in order to reauthorize it. So however the FBI got its initial warrant for Page, the Nunes memo suggests that once surveillance of Page started, it continued producing foreign intelligence."This is a prolongation of the original straw man argument presented earlier. By saying "however the FBI got its initial warrant for Page," Ewing is misrepresenting the fundamental intent of the memo. The "however" of the manner in which the FISA warrant was obtained included illegal activity and the falsification of information. The "however" is also the fact that McCabe had testified in front of the House Intelligence Committee in December of 2017 that the FISA warrant could not be obtained if it weren't for the information provided in the Steele Dossier, which we now understand to be a politically motivated, fallacious document.
I'm sure that at this point, you all, my wonderful audience, are getting slightly frustrated with the level of detail that I go into when discussing and analyzing these articles. Believe me, I get frustrated as well. In fact, I think it's one of the most difficult and challenging things about being a free, independent thinker in our great country. Although I am analyzing what I believe to be a left-wing reporter's interpretation of a memo (and not only that but I'm also grilling into it rather harshly), I find this sort of journalistic integrity with any kind of politically biased news source.
Political journalists don't tell you what you need to know. They tell you what they want you to know. Since we all have our own, individual political agenda, we always tend to revolve around journalists who share our own political agenda. In this aspect, these journalists only tell us what we want to know because we want what they want. I believe that journalists have become very, very good at persuading readers into believing what they want their readers to believe because they have found a way to manipulate this natural attraction people have to like-minded political thinkers. They are able to subtly convince their readers into believing that what the journalist wants you to know is what you want to know.
They do this by starting off each article with an exposition of a plot. It's really similar to how an author writes a novel; they set the scene for you. They create the world that they want you to believe is true, and they do so by employing the same writing techniques that a novelist would use. Think about the exposition of this article; it uses elegant and emotional descriptors to put into place a scene that may or may not happened. Ewing says that the memo caused hyperpartisan tension, but the memo ended up flopping in its significance. Isn't that odd? A large amount of politicians made claims that they read the memo and said it was one of the most damning, threatening, and important pieces of literature in our nation's history, and the day it was released, it turned out to be nothing that important. Really? So Democrats said it was a great danger to our nation after they read it, and now that it's released, it's a "nothingburger?"
And who decided that it was nothing? Republicans? Democrats? The Mainstream Media? or possibly Philip Ewing himself is so knowledgeable about the matter that he can promise to us that it's not important while at the same time detail the importance of the memo to us simpletons. It's all incredibly fascinating.
Thank you for taking the time out of your day to read or listen to the State of the Media Podcast. Next week I'll most likely change to a different article since I'm becoming bored of this one and it's analysis has become far more indulgent than I had originally intended. If you like this sort of content, please leave a comment or send me an email on how I can better improve the production of this podcast or if you have any suggestions on topics I should discuss or articles I should analyze. Thanks, and hope to see you all again next week.
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