On Wednesday, panelists on MSNBC Live With Craig Melvin aired their concerns about Congressman Devin Nunes’s memo alleging procedural abuse by FBI and DOJ officials. In anticipation of the memo being made available to the public, network hosts have begun challenging its veracity in an effort to pre-empt its release.
Unfortunately, because the memo’s contents are not yet publicly available, these conversations inevitably involve some degree of speculation, and often include some very creative phrasing. The Wednesday panel’s discussion was no exception, but it was perhaps more misleading than most.
The spin began after journalist Pete Williams read aloud an official FBI statement regarding the memo. Of particular interest was a line which asserted FBI officials “have great concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”
Panelists struggled to color inside the lines while discussing the statement’s implications, and within ten minutes, former RNC Chairman Michael Steele had alleged that Congressman Nunes had actively fabricated evidence in the memo:
There must be something here that bothers the White House and certain Republicans on the Hill enough that they feel they need to impugn the character of the FBI and go down this road, creating a false narrative – making up fake evidence, really. Because that's essentially what you're doing. You don't have all the facts in front of you. You're just cobbling together the little pieces that you want to create a narrative that doesn't exist.
Of course, the FBI have never accused Nunes of “making up fake evidence.” Nor has House Intelligence Committee Minority Leader Adam Schiff, who was so troubled by Nunes’s memo that he made his own version to clarify what he considers to be gaps in the narrative.
In fact, the only public figures who have asserted that Nunes’s memo contains outright fabrications are, paradoxically, those who have not read it. The case could even be made that Mr. Steele himself has fabricated evidence for his own narrative by accusing Congressman Nunes of doing so.
