Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA
I’m not going to flood the zone on the Nunes memo. Others can do that. But I want to highlight a point I made in the previous post: we’ve known what was in the memo for weeks. There have been hundreds of stories about it, and the actual charges it lays out are so weak that they’ve usually been treated as just a brief aside. The main story has always been about the partisan fight over releasing the memo.
In other words: we’ve had weeks to mull over the possibility that the FBI’s FISA application for Carter Page relied partly on the Steele dossier, and nobody has cared much. There have been no blaring headlines about it. There have been no experts telling us that this is a bombshell. It hasn’t spawned any new reporting, or if it has, the reporting has come up dry. The accusations in the memo just aren’t very important even if they’re true.
So now the memo is out, and it says what we all thought it said. Nobody cared very much before, so there’s no reason to care very much now. It’s all just spectacle.
And by the way, here are the Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee:
- Devin Nunes, Chairman
- Mike Conaway
- Peter King
- Frank LoBiondo
- Tom Rooney
- Ileana Ros-Lehtinen
- Michael Turner
- Brad Wenstrup
- Chris Stewart
- Rick Crawford
- Trey Gowdy
- Elise Stefanik
- Will Hurd
Remember those names. Intelligence committees have long been the last refuge of serious, bipartisan congressional work. These are the people who have destroyed that.
