No.
Just, no.
There was no FBI plot to “take down” the Trump administration, because the FBI isn’t a 1980’s action movie villain.
This is a pernicious claim put forth by bad faith actors such as Devin Nunes, a Republican US Representative from California and the then-chair of the House Intelligence Committee.
So, wait – is there a memo?
There is – and, as the BBC describes it, it’s the memo that everyone is talking about, but no-one can (really) talk about.
The document in question was written by staffers working for Nunes. At the time that Representative Nunes was overseeing investigations into potential Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election in his role as chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Mr. Nunes was simultaneously under investigation himself, by the House Ethics Committee, for possibly sharing classified intelligence with White House officials.
What’s in the memo?
According to BBC reports, the memo draws on highly classified info about FBI surveillance practices. Republicans believed to have or claiming to have read the memo assert that the intelligence community abused those practices in an effort to undermine the Trump campaign for the presidency.
The core of Republican’s argument centers around questioning the inciting factor to initiate surveillance of one-time Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page. Republicans have been adamant in insisting that the decision to surveil Page came only after the distribution of what’s known as the Steele dossier, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele’s dossier of largely unsubstantiated raw intelligence on the connections between the Trump campaign and President Trump himself on the one hand and a collection of suspicious Russian, Ukrainian and other oligarchs.
Those advancing this argument have not satisfactorily addressed claims from members of the intelligence community, who uniformly assert that Page was ‘on the counter-intelligence radar’ for some time prior to the distribution of the Steele dossier.
It is also believed that the memo originating with Trump lackey Nunes might contain evidence of anti-Trump sentiment from high-level FBI officials. Those comments likely are in reference to text messages, already widely distributed by Congressional Republicans to friendly press outlets, sent by Peter Strzok, a former FBI Russia expert and eventual member of Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation into the same question of Russian influence on the 2016 presidential election.
How do Democrats see the memo?
Safe to say, less damning.
Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee who has made a name for himself with his deft handling of subsequent impeachment hearings, described it as ‘profoundly misleading’, and based on cherry-picked information.
More damningly, and beyond the factual inaccuracies contained within, Schiff also noted that the memo references highly classified materials that most Republican Congressional members haven’t read.