New Poll on Nunes Memo Spells Bad News For Democrats

As heavily as the mainstream media has worked to paint the House Intelligence Committee memo on FBI surveillance of the Donald Trump campaign as a non-story, it looks like the truth is getting through to the American people.

According to a new Rasumssen survey, half of likely voters believe, or are at least receptive to, the idea that there’s a real scandal here, and that the Obama Administration did something illegal in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election:

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 50% of Likely U.S. Voters believe it’s at least Somewhat Likely senior federal law enforcement officials broke the law in an effort to prevent Donald Trump from winning the presidency, including 32% who think it’s Very Likely. Forty percent (40%) think it’s not likely these officials broke the law, with 25% who feel it’s Not At All Likely. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

The survey of 1,000 Likely U.S. Voters was conducted on February 5-6, 2018 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.

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At Powerline, John Hindraker speculates that the Dems might have themselves to blame for these numbers:

It is enough to make one wonder whether the Democrats’ over-the-top attacks on Nunes and the memo did more to call attention to the memo than to undermine it. Also, the memo doesn’t necessarily describe anything illegal. It seems that a lot of voters are assuming the worst about James Comey, Peter Strocz, Lisa Page, Loretta Lynch and the rest of the Obama administration’s rogues gallery.

Indeed. Between voting against allowing the American people to see the memo in the first place and going from “OMG IT’LL ENDANGER NATIONAL SECURITY!” to “nothing to see here” in the span of a day, the Democrats have most certainly not been acting like people who have nothing to hide.

As TFPP has detailed, the GOP memo says that top FBI officials used the Fusion GPS dossier — a falsehood-ridden document partially financed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democrat National Committee — as the basis for a FISA surveillance application against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page despite knowing about the document’s partisan origins, yet they withheld that information from the FISA court.

As conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt — a legal expert with extensive experience in these matters from his time in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department — wrote this week, “the non-disclosure was a breach of trust, and it will have long-term consequences for the warrant application process”:

Upon publication of the Nunes memo, a retired federal judge emailed me: “There is not an officer of the court in the land who in the context of this particular application to the FISA court should not have identified the source of the information as having been the [Democratic National Committee] and the Clinton Campaign. If I had granted the application and then subsequently learned that the information was sourced to the DNC and the Campaign, I would have rescinded the authorization and issued a show-cause order to the Government to explain who and why this sourcing was not made known to the court. The fact (if it be that) that the Government told the court that it was a political source, but did not identify who, in this particular instance, is highly probative that the Government purposely misled the court.”

For more, check out Mollie Hemingway’s article at The Federalist detailing how a Senate criminal referral from Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham corroborates key details of the Nunes memo.

Of course, 50% of likely voters is still a precarious number that could go either way. What will really matter is whether the GOP is up for a PR fight to make sure the facts stay front and center in the public consciousness. Alas, the jury’s still out on that one…