Brooks: Memo Shows FBI’s Conduct ‘Not Great’ – Memo Also ‘Undermines’ Idea that Investigation Is Based on Dem Partisanship

On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks responded to the House GOP Intel memo by stating that it isn’t good that the FBI didn’t disclose to the court that they were using information from the Steele dossier and who funded it, but the memo also “undermines the main narrative that this whole investigation is premised on some Democratic partisan work.”

Brooks said, “It’s like a mini, mini little buster, whatever you call a mini-buster. You know, it’s not great that the FBI apparently didn’t tell the courts that this — where their information came from, that it came from the Steele dossier and that that was funded by the Democrats. You would like to think, as a part of a normal process, they would say, ‘We have this information. This is how we got it.’ That seems like the way the system should work. But as something that’s going to derail the investigation, or as something that makes the FBI look particularly bad, it really doesn’t.”

He continued, “To me, the main effect is that it undercuts one of the main Trump narratives. And the main Trump narrative has been that this got started because some mixture of FBI partisans, Obama-Clinton people had this Steele dossier, and that launched this investigation. But what we learned in the last paragraph of this memo is the investigation got launched, nothing to do with the Steele dossier. It had to do with this conversation this guy George Papadopoulos had with an Australian diplomat in London at a wine bar. … And so, that undermines the main narrative that this whole investigation is premised on some Democratic partisan work. It’s not true.”

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