What Did Comey Tell President Trump about the Steele Dossier? National Review, Feb 15, 2018, Andrew C. McCarthy
The Rice email outlines Obama’s strategy to withhold key details of the Russia investigation. <snip>
Instead, it is a safe bet that the dossier briefing was kept to a minimum and that Trump was told he was not a suspect. The latter was true in only the most hyper-technical and misleading of senses. Basically, after the “follow-on†discussion with Obama, Rice, and Biden on January 5, the FBI and the Justice Department proceeded to define the concept of being “under investigation†in a manner so crimped as to render it unrecognizable. A person was deemed “under investigation†only if he was the formal target of a FISA warrant — as if the warrant application were the totality of the investigation, as if the person formally targeted for surveillance were the only person of interest to the FBI. By thus bowdlerizing what it means to be a suspect, Comey could repeatedly assure Trump that he (Trump) was not “personally under investigation.†After all, Trump himself was not the target of the surveillance — only underlings like Page (and perhaps Manafort) were formally alleged to be agents of a foreign power for FISA purposes.
This is a distorted understanding of how investigations work. 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-Ã -vis Trump.
<snip>
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).
Read more at:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/456435/rice-email-reveals-plan-dont-tell-trump-hes-being-investigated
