The poisoned memo

The Duce has released it in full and unredacted.

According to MSNBC and their sources in the Justice Department and FBI, the memo is totally misleading, apparently as to how a FISA warrant was obtained against Carter Page, but it cannot be corrected without releasing even more highly classified information and compounding the national security risk.

So the president and his allies have set up a wonderful occasion for discrediting the Russiagate investigation, pretending to show much of it has been based on political bias and only the flimsiest of evidential bases.

We don't have the text, yet.

But it has been decided we will.

Score one for Devin Nunes and the most unscrupulous liars and fraudsters among the Trumpists.

From the Editorial Board of The Times.

The Republican Plot Against the F.B.I.

Tim Weiner thinks Trump is getting set for another Saturday Night Massacre.

[Trump] clearly sees the memo as a weapon of political warfare — a way to rid himself of Mr. Rosenstein, who oversees both the F.B.I. and the special prosecutor investigating the White House, Robert Mueller. 

Mr. Rosenstein has made it clear that he will not fire Mr. Mueller at the president’s whim — which, to the president, means he needs to go.

. . . .

He now stands on the verge of re-enacting the Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon forced out his own attorney general and the next man in line in order to sack the special prosecutor investigating Watergate. 

Nixon’s willing executioner back in the October 1973 was the No. 3 man at Justice, the solicitor general Robert Bork. 

At the end of that fateful night, Nixon promised him the next seat on the Supreme Court. 

It worked out badly for all concerned — Nixon resigned anyway, and Bork’s actions were a major strike against him in his unsuccessful nomination to the court.

Where’s Mr. Trump’s Bork? 

Could it be the associate attorney general, Rachel Lee Brand, a former professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School and now the third-ranking Justice Department official? 

Would she want to carry the same weight under which Bork labored for all his life?

. . . .

The president has measured Mr. Mueller for the guillotine for months. 

As the bloodhounds close in on the Oval Office, he may sharpen his blade and place the prosecutor’s head on a pike. 

If so, he’ll have to confront the Constitution. 

And he’ll lose again.

Frankly, I think Weiner is bluffing.

If The Duce has his massacre the Democrats can, and the Republicans will, do nothing about it.