John Batchelor discusses, with former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, the FISA-court application that got the Mueller investigation started. (The redacted application was finally released this weekend in response to persistent FOIA pressure by Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch.)
The interview is in two parts, here and here.
Mr. McCarthy writes about the release in his latest column, here. He focuses in particular on the FBI’s use of the word “VERIFIED” to describe the wholly unverified allegations in the Steele dossier, and is astonished that the FBI, the DOJ, and the FISA court would work together to produce a FISA warrant without rigorously vetting the sources of the relevant allegations. (Christopher Steele, on whose say-so the whole thing rests, was not a primary, and perhaps was not even a secondary or tertiary, source.)
See also Byron York’s careful comparison of the newly released document with the claims made in the Nunes memo of five months ago.