Some tough questions from the WSJ.

Quote:Bit by bit, congressional investigators have wrested important truths from a recalcitrant Federal Bureau of Investigation about its suspect 2016 election dealings. But there’s one secret the G-men jealously guard: how central that Steele dossier was from the start.

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes on Wednesday sent another letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray to demand yet again that they comply with an August 2017 subpoena and hand over, among other things, the electronic communication—“EC” in investigative jargon—that officially kicked off the counterintelligence investigation into alleged Trump-Russia collusion.

That EC has taken on a central importance thanks to the FBI’s own leaks. The bureau exploded it on the country at the end of last year after the news broke that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National had paid for the infamous dossier. The public still doesn’t know how much the FBI used it. Critics started asking: Was it part of the application for a surveillance warrant against Carter Page ? Could it even have launched the investigation?

The only plausible reason the FBI might have for denying House Intelligence access to an unredacted EC is that it contains intelligence from foreign sources. Intelligence-sharing agreements between allies sometimes include restrictions on dissemination. But it was precisely that intelligence that was already leaked to the press. We know the Papadopoulos story came via Australia, and we know what was said.

The allegations in the dossier against Carter Page served as the basis for the significant task of obtaining a FISA court eavesdropping warrant and three subsequent renewals. The FBI’s every action in recent months has appeared designed to fuzz up that reality—from planting the “origin” story to denying Congress any access to the eavesdropping documents for months to continuing to limit severely the number of people who can look at them.

Here’s what has become very clear: The FBI relied significantly on a Clinton opposition-research document in pursuing its Trump investigation. No amount of diversionary talk over other evidence can now change that.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-is-the...mail_share

For those who subscribe to the "three-dimensional chess" theory of the Trump administration (which is not me; I think they're all nitwits), this recalcitrance on the part of the FBI is choreographed.

Whatever little tidbit is yet to be revealed, releasing it now would be too early. Better instead to have Wray and Rosenstein delay, delay, delay until we get much closer to the midterm elections, and then dribble it out then to the exuberant cheers of Fox News and the forced silence of MSNBC, CNN, etc.