This is a Cato Special Podcast. I'm Caleb Brown. That memo, written by House

staff shielded from public scrutiny. It could be a bunch of talking points for defenders of the

president and it might reveal serious problems in how the federal FISA court does its job.

Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, comments.

Here's what we know now. There is a memo.

That was written by the staff of Devon Nunez in the House.

Anyone in the U.S. House or Representatives can look at it.

The public cannot look at it. But it's not clear what it says, but the thinking is that it's going

to vindicate everything that Donald Trump has ever said about the dastardly deep state.

Right, that's the idea.

And the specific contents are a bit vague, but the suggestion is that it is supposed to show some kind of misconduct by people at the FBI

in not just conducting the investigation generally but in particular in obtaining

FISA warrants against Paul Manafort and in particular Carter Page a former

policy advisor to the Trump campaign.

And again, the secondhand report suggests that a lot of the focus here is on the extent

to which the now infamous Steel dossier compiled by a former British

Intelligence Officer working for a research firm that had been hired by the Democratic National Committee

to gather information about Trump's ties to Russia.

There is the extent to which that dossier may have been used as a basis for wiretap order from the

foreign intelligence surveillance court.

So let me ask related to that. How hard is it to get a FISA warrant generally?

Well, it depends who you ask. In general, FISA warrant applications are not public. We've actually had a sort of outpouring

...