Monday, February 05, 2018

American Family Association wants credit for release of disastrous Nunes memo

Anti-LGBTQ hate group wants partial credit for the release of the Nunes FISA memo. I say it's all yours.

And the winner of the "You Really Should Keep Your Mouth Shut Because You Sound A Damn Fool" award this evening goes to anti-LGBTQ and Trump supporting evangelical hate group the American Family Association.

When I read the email from AFA president Tim Wildmon, I nearly choked from laughter. It definitely made my day:

Recently, we sent you an AFA Action Alert, asking you to contact President Donald Trump, your representative, and senators and urge them to take the necessary steps to declassify and publicly release a four-page FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) memo to the American public. 
High ranking government officials reported that a classified, four-page memo, dubbed the "FISA memo," had been made available to every member of the U.S. House of Representatives. 
The memo highlights extensive and abusive and likely illegal surveillance of private American citizens by federal government agencies. The classified memo contains details of a coordinated effort between government agencies, including the DOJ and FBI, and the Hillary Clinton political campaign against President Donald Trump, both prior to and following the presidential election. 
Your actions helped get the controversial four-page FISA memo written by the majority staff of the House Intelligence Committee has been released by President Trump.

For those who don't know, the FISA memo has been all of the talk since last week. It was a memo written at the direction of House Intelligence chairman Devin Nunes of CA and it claims that there is a conspiracy to unseat Donald Trump as president via the FBI. Before it's release, conservatives and the right-wing media had been hyping it up as "worse than Watergate" (i.e. the scandal which led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in the mid-1970s.). Self-avowed Trumpaholic Sean Hannity of Fox News was especially hyping it it to death.


However the majority of folks felt that its release was merely a tactic to throw confusion into the ongoing investigation of how much did Russia influence the election of Trump as president. And that feeling didn't change when the memo was actually released.

To put it nicely, the memo was a huge dud. It didn't show anything shocking nor did it prove anything resembling a conspiracy to get Trump to show his bald spot, much less unseat him as president.

Media source after media source rightfully declared it to be an awful smokescreen. Some said it proved that the investigation of Russian influence in the 2016 election was legitimate. Even Republicans, such as Rep. Trey Gowdy of SC and pundits on Fox News (a manically pro-Trump "news" network) such as Judge Andrew Napolitano said the memo doesn't prove any type of conspiracy.

Another Republican, Sen. John McCain of AZ, blasted the memo, saying that releasing it served no American interests.

All in all, while the release of the FISA memo may have muddied up the waters a bit for the Russian investigation, it's looking bad for the Trump Administration. So if  the American Family Association wants to grab credit for this slow moving, but most assured disaster, I say feel free.

No comments: