Living "by the book"

At National Review, Andrew McCarthy weighs in on the email Donna Rice emailed to herself 15 minutes after her time was up at the White House on January 21, 2017.

An email written on January 21 to record decisions made on January 5 is not written to memorialize what was decided. It is written to revise the memory of what was decided in order to rationalize what was then done.

We might counter that people who have lived “by the book” for eight years would not have to remind each other to go “by the book.” It would go without saying.

...That is what Rice’s email is really about: not sharing with the incoming Trump administration classified information about the Trump-Russia investigation, such as the basis for seeking a FISA warrant on Carter Page.

...The main purpose of counterintelligence operations is to keep the president informed; but when it came to the incoming president, law-enforcement leaders treated the Russia investigation like a criminal probe in which Trump was a suspect.

Whether eavesdropping is done for national-security purposes under FISA or for law-enforcement purposes under criminal statutes, the objective is always the same: to uncover the full scope of a conspiratorial enterprise. The point is to identify all of the conspirators, and especially to establish the complicity of the most insulated leaders. Carter Page may have been the surveillance target named in the FISA warrant, but he was of low rank in the alleged conspiracy. The point of monitoring Page was to determine exactly what he was doing and, just as crucial, who was directing him. In the conspiracy outlined by Steele, Page was a virtual nobody. His only relevance was vis-à-vis Trump.

The investigation was about suspected Kremlin complicity with Trump; it was about the possibility that an adversary regime was in a position to blackmail the president of the United States. It was never about Carter Page.

...the challenge for Obama’s team was to keep the investigation going even after Trump took office.

...Since Trump would have the power to shut down the investigation, the trick was to avoid making him feel threatened by it. Therefore, the strategy was to withhold information that illustrated Trump’s centrality to the investigation, assure him that he was not a suspect, and gently admonish him about the need to respect law enforcement’s independence (on pain of being accused of obstruction).

...But Comey only gave the private assurances that the president was not “personally under investigation” in order to discourage Trump from interfering in the probe. The real objective of investigating Page and Manafort was to uncover corrupt ties — if there were any — between Russia and Trump. Thus, Trump was always under investigation even if he was not personally targeted for FISA surveillance.

To tell Trump he was not under investigation was misleading. Just like Susan Rice’s email was misleading. The strategy forged by top Obama political and law-enforcement officials was to pursue an investigation of President Trump without sharing the full details of the investigation. They made a plan: Give Trump just a sliver of what the probe is about, tell him he is not under investigation, and keep investigating him under the guise of investigating Page, Manafort, and the Steele dossier.

It is getting close to two years with no apparent evidence of an actionable Trump–Russia conspiracy. Nevertheless, it is still necessary to ask: Is President Trump under investigation for collusion with the Kremlin? If not, shouldn’t he and the country be told that? And since counterintelligence investigations are conducted to inform the president — the constitutional officer responsible for national security against foreign threats — it is worth asking: What was the difference between what the FBI told the FISA court about the Trump–Russia investigation and what they told the president of the United States about it?

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