From Gary Gindler, at American Thinker:

[W]e know that the chain of events associated with the case of Trump’s “criminal collusion with Putin” looks like this:

Trump’s political opponents during the primaries hired the firm Fusion GPS, which specializes in opposition research, to dig up some dirt on Trump

After Trump won the primaries, Fusion GPS lost the customer, but just for a short while

The new customers of the dirt on Trump become the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC

The new customers requested dirt on Trump from Fusion GPS, not only in the American domain but also in the international arena

To add international dimension, Fusion GPS hired a subcontractor – former resident of British intelligence in Moscow Christopher Steele, known for his open anti-Trump beliefs

Christopher Steele hired some former agents of the Russian intelligence services (against whom he once fought during the Cold War)

The agents of Russian intelligence services concoct a dirty file on Trump (linguistic analysis confirmed that this dossier was written in “Russian English” with minimal editing by native English speakers)

It is still unclear as to what extent these Russian agents were the “former” agents of the Russian intelligence services (that is, to what extent this dossier is fiction, and to what extent is it the deliberate work of the KGB/FSB disinformation effort)

Trump’s dossier, compiled by the Russians, gets to the FBI through the Assistant Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, who received it from his wife. At that time, she was working for Fusion GPS and was a part of the anti-Trump research team

The FBI used this dossier as one of the key arguments in the secret intelligence court FISC to obtain a warrant to wiretap the Trump campaign

In other words, the Obama administration used a dossier concocted by Russian agents to legitimize its surveillance of their political opposition.

According to the memo, FBI leaders knew precisely where the dossier came from, but in the application to the FISC, they presented the dossier as a proven fact, and not as opposition research. It was not just a mere bureaucratic mistake — the FBI used the dossier in such a way not once, but at least four times.

As a result, the Trump campaign was under surveillance by the FBI before the elections, after the elections, and even after the inauguration of President Trump.

Read more.

Victor Davis Hanson succinctly sums it up.

If all this is not a scandal — then the following protocols are now considered permissible in American electoral practice and constitutional jurisprudence: An incumbent administration can freely use the FBI and the DOJ to favor one side in a presidential election, by buying its opposition research against the other candidate, using its own prestige to authenticate such a third-party oppositional dossier, and then using it to obtain court-ordered wiretaps on American citizens employed by a candidate’s campaign — and do so by deliberately misleading the court about the origins and authors of the dossier that was used to obtain the warrants.

RTWT

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The Onion:

WASHINGTON—Stressing that such an action would be highly reckless, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned Thursday that releasing the “Nunes Memo” could potentially undermine faith in the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies of the United States. “Making this memo public will almost certainly impede our ability to conduct clandestine activities operating outside any legal or judicial system on an international scale,” said Wray, noting that it was essential that mutual trust exist between the American people and the vast, mysterious cabal given free rein to use any tactics necessary to conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens or subvert religious and political groups. “If we take away the people’s faith in this shadowy monolith exempt from any consequences, all that’s left is an extensive network of rogue, unelected intelligence officers carrying out extrajudicial missions for a variety of subjective, and occasionally personal, reasons.” At press time, Wray confirmed the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies were unaware of any wrongdoing for violating constitutional rights.