What was the TOP SECRET information in the Nunes Memo?

Question

By order of the President, the Nunes Memo was declassified. If you look at the page headers of the memo, you can see it was classified as TOP SECRET, i.e. Such material would cause "exceptionally grave damage" to national security if made publicly available.

What part of that memo has this potential? That there is a FISC issuing FISA warrants? The public knew that already. That the warrant to electronically surveil Carter Page was renewed three times? Something else?

Or is it just common practice to classify all documents of that committee as TOP SECRET, even in the absence of sensitive information?

Answer 1

It was the FBI/Justice department that classified the information in the memo, not the committee. Example source:

The details of FISA surveillance orders are classified, and they have long been among the government’s most carefully guarded national security secrets.

It's not just that they were issuing them, but also the details of the issuance, e.g. when the order was issued, who issued it, and the justification given. The traditional government position has been that all of the details are classified and any information dervived from them is also classified.

For example, someone (e.g. a Russian counter-intelligence agent) may look at the original warrant and observe what activity led to it. Russia could then use that information to either avoid that situation (so a warrant is never issued) or deliberately provoke such a situation (causing a warrant to be issued). It would tend to do the former if it was trying to collect information and the latter if it was trying to plant false information.

With the change of administrations, much of this information is no longer relevant. Moreover, what is still relevant may be less valuable as a secret than for transparency. This is especially so since the underlying information has been leaking continually since Donald Trump took office. In particular, information regarded as negative to Trump has been leaking from people like James Comey and Sally Yates. Since Trump controls the administration, he doesn't have to leak. He can openly release the information.

Members of Congress can also openly disclose classified information in committee. That precedent was set with the Pentagon Papers:

in 1971, Sen. Mike Gravel of Alaska read the Pentagon Papers into the record of a subcommittee he chaired, at a hearing he called for specifically this purpose. The Supreme Court called Gravel’s claim of immunity “incontrovertible.”

Answer 2

There are some excellent answers here. There are two things I'd add:

1. Nunes edited the memo in the hours prior to its release. I'm not suggesting anything nefarious in this particular, but there may have been some last-minute changes to remove those elements, knowing that POTUS was likely to fully declassify it without redactions;

2. While much of it has been removed, there are still some chronological details that could compromise intelligence sources and methods. For example, if an adversary knows the exact date a conversation was surveilled, who was being surveilled (in this case Page), it's not hard to figure out who the other participant(s) were to that conversation (especially when the contents/topic(s) of the conversation are known). This kind of information seems trivial to the average observer, but it's not -- it risks exposing/burning double agents and other intelligence assets.

Answer 3

According to Wired, the new information is that the application for a FISA extension was partly based on the Steele dossier, which was partly funded by Democrats. The memo also alleges that this funding was not presented to the FISA court.

As the Wired article suggests, if this were true to the extent alleged by Republicans (which is disputed by -- among others -- the FBI and Democrats familiar with the underlying documents), it would "reveal legitimate lapses in the FISA system". FISA is already perceived negatively because of secret courts with no possibility to defend. Despite this criticism, former administrations as well as the current one consider it essential to national security. Thus documents which delegitimize FISA can be seen as dangerous to national security.

Apart from the FISA delegitimization, it seems that the documents the memo is based on are top secret, so the memo is classified like that as well to avoid accidental leakage of information. An official review by the DOJ could make sure that no information in the memo is actually top secret, but Republicans rejected such a review, which the DOJ called "extraordinarily reckless".

Answer 4

Well, if nothing else, the names of the people who signed the warrants had to be top secret. In fact, it's been reported that DOJ wanted the names redacted even after the declassification of the memo became imminent.

Answer 5

There may not have been any TOP SECRET information in the memo to start with.

When summarizing information from a document marked TOP SECRET, it would be safe to mark any summary similarly. That's because very few people are empowered to make the classification decisions. They are called the classifying authority. The president delegates his authority to those classifying authorities, and so he can override any classification decision.

So if you are doing any kind of copy/paste into a document, the safe thing is to mark it identically to the source document. Generally speaking, Congress and its staff are NOT classification authorities, but they can have clearances to look at classified documents. If they slip up and reveal something TOP SECRET, they would probably lose their clearances.

The remaining redactions, such as individual names, are not necessarily classified, because personally, identifiable information (PII) can (in fact should) be redacted without being classified.

P.S. This is exactly the area where Hillary Clinton (HRC) and her staff really screwed up. It is clear that her staff copied information from classified documents without properly marking the copies, and then sent them via unclassified e-mail/text to HRC. Of course, HRC claimed she didn't know the information was classified. Preventing people claiming they didn't know is the whole reason for the classification marking system.