Nobody on the Senate Judiciary Committee today seemed to understand the use of raw human intelligence in counterintelligence

The Democrats did pretty well today in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, but they could have done better. 1/30

The main failing was that the Democrats did not challenge the constant invective that the Republicans directed at the Steele dossier, which they denounced as pure political garbage (to use what seems to be Lindsey Graham’s favorite word now). 2/30

Democrats should have challenged this, because, left unchallenged, Republicans had a field day with it. 3/30

In fact, all the Republicans had to use against the dossier is that in the course of its investigation the FBI found additional evidence about the dossier that showed that it was weaker than it had appeared to be initially, and that this was never conveyed to the FISA court. 4/30

But “weaker” doesn’t mean “worthless garbage,” and Horowitz never said or even implied that it does, either in his report or in his testimony. 5/30

All Horowitz did say on the matter in his Report is the following. 6/30

(Note that the IG does not question the use of the dossier in the first application, based on the imperfect evidence the court had at the time. But according to Graham in his opening statement today, even the first Carter Page application was illegal because it was based on the dossier, and was therefore fraudulent. Hopefully, an agreement on this can be worked out between the FBI, the DOJ, the OIG, and Senator Graham before Graham’s hissy fit leads to real damage to U.S. national security.)

Horowitz didn’t speculate on this point, but the Republicans on the committee sure did — and wildly so. 7/30

The Republicans had already decided before the hearing began that the court had been bamboozled, and that it had been given complete, worthless trash as a basis for granting the Carter Page FISA warrants, 8/30

and that all of it had been motivated by nothing more than anti-Trump hatred and a desire to take him down. 9/30

(Graham even made it clear during the hearing that unless he is satisfied by the FISA court that it accepts his own damning assessment of the dossier, he will introduce legislation to abolish the FISA court altogether!) 10/30

It wasn’t Horowitz’s responsibility to challenge the Republicans on this point; it was the Democrats’ responsibility to raise the question and force the issue. 11/30

Since Democrats didn’t do anything to counter the Republicans’ attack on the dossier, the Republicans’ slander against Steele and his dossier was left as the committee’s default position on the matter. 12/30

The Democrats could easily have challenged the Republicans on the committee by simply quoting the position Horowitz had taken in the quote above. 13/30

If the Republicans wanted to substitute their own judgment for the court’s, they could certainly do that, but not without making a case against the dossier, which would have involved making a case against using raw human intelligence (HUMINT) in FISA applications generally. 14/30

But that discussion would inevitably have taken the Republicans on the committee to a very hard place, because legislating to bar the court from considering HUMINT like the Steele dossier in all FISA applications would seriously weaken U.S. national security. 15/30

No doubt Horowitz himself, and in fact everyone in the National Security Division of the DOJ and the national security and counterintelligence divisions of the FBI, would agree with that. 16/30

It might help to consider a particular detail about the dossier that came up repeatedly in the hearing today to make this point. 17/30

Horowitz says in his Report that the Primary Sub-source in the dossier (his office interviewed this individual three times) said that some of the information that he had passed on to Steele was told to him in a bar. 18/30

Yes, in a BAR!

Can you imagine! A bar!

To the Republicans, this is all that is needed to show that the dossier was, well, utterly worthless garbage. 19/30

But where in the world do the Republicans on this committee think that HUMINT like Steele’s and the CIA’s comes from? Only from safe rooms located in the basements of the security services of hostile formal powers? 20/30

Crossfire Hurricane itself was opened based on something that someone heard in a bar! 21/30

(George Papadopoulos mentioned the Clinton emails that Russia planned to dump to help the Trump campaign to Amb. Alexander Downer in a wine-bar in London.) 22/30

Yet not a single person in the hearing today denied that this particular conversation in a bar provided all the evidence that was needed to predicate the opening of Operation Crossfire Hurricane. 23/30

It was pretty outrageous that the Democrats failed to notice Republican vulnerability on the point, but they failed to note it, obviously, because they had no interest in taking up a defense of the dossier itself. 24/30

Let us consider one more example: the infamous pee-tape allegation. (This one I have already considered in a previous thread.) 25/30

The Report says: 26/30

But then there is this footnote (fn. 341): 27/30

Was Steele then not entitled to say that the pee-tape allegation had been confirmed? Well, it seems that it was at least partly confirmed, unless one expects that confirmation requires actually having in hand a videotape of the alleged incident from the Kremlin archives. 28/30

The whole Senate Judiciary Committee, clearly, needs to be educated on how counterintelligence and confidential human sources work in the real world. 29/30

Feinstein, the ranking member of the committee, should recommend private or public hearings for the committee so that the members can get educated on this. (Lindsey Graham would especially benefit from it.) 30/30