He went on, "You can thus assume there was A LOT of evidence in that warrant application.
Certainly, we know that the FBI sought a FISA warrant on this case and may well have received one in October, and that the Steele memos may well have played a role in that warrant application.
Seizing upon the inclusion of information from a dossier of reports compiled by a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele — working for a firm that had been hired by lawyers for the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign — Trump argued that the warrant application and, by extension, the Mueller investigation were invalid.
Republicans have argued that the warrant application was based on unsubstantiated information from a political adversary and thus should never have been submitted to the court for approval.
"Both Defendant and the ACLU argue that the warrant application for the mobile tracking device was inadequate because it did not include the technical details about how the device worked," Campbell wrote.
Over the weekend, the government released a redacted version of the application for that warrant.
But Mr. Vladeck cautioned that without seeing the warrant application, it was impossible to say whether that information was just "background noise" or pivotal.
From the evidence at hand though, it's certainly fair to assume that it's Nunes's memo, not the warrant application, that suffered from a stronger political bias in its creation.
It's worth remembering that the part of the warrant application that we can see, the part that makes up most of what we know about the application, is visible because Nunes's memo already told us what it said.
According to a search warrant application that was posted on the Smoking Gun Web site, the police raided the house for evidence and interviewed a roommate (Jamie Chung) and a producer (Kevin Lee) as potential witnesses.
In February of 2018, in another unexpected window into the investigation, the Tallahassee Democrat reported the contents of a search warrant application that had been filed under seal but inadvertently made public.
