Now comes the latest supposed vindication, the Nunes reprise. Perhaps this will turn out differently when the memo itself is released, and it will in fact end Trump’s troubles, but there are plenty of reasons to doubt that.

For one thing, the memo is not even four pages long, which raises questions about how much it can really say. Like the first round of Nunes, this has been a comedy of errors. After Nunes and staffers produced the memo, ranking committee Democrat Adam Schiff said that most of the committee was unfamiliar with the underlying intelligence—an assertion that the Justice Department confirmed in a letter to the White House, saying Nunes himself had not read the materials. Republicans pushing for the memo’s release have argued that the intelligence community is prone to abuse, even as they voted against reforms that might constrain surveillance. Nunes did not directly answer a question about whether he had coordinated with the White House on this memo as well. Republicans have refused to release publicly a Democratic memo replying to Nunes’s memo. The release of the memo has also set off an unprecedented conflict between the Justice Department and White House.

Then on Wednesday night, Schiff claimed that Nunes had materially edited the memo between when the House Intelligence Committee voted (along party lines) to send it to the White House to review for release—meaning the committee had voted to send a different memo. Nunes acknowledged the edits but contended they were minor. This is not the sort of handling that fills one with confidence that everything here is being done competently and on the up-and-up.

These are all second-order considerations, though. What about the memo itself? The central accusation, based on what’s known, is that the Justice Department improperly signed off on an application to a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act judge for a warrant to surveil Page. The application (the memo contends) was based on information from a dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent who was researching Trump for a company paid by the Democratic National Committee.

As I have reported, and as Orin Kerr also writes, this is dubious. First, it’s doubtful that the warrant application would have been based solely on the Steele dossier. American intelligence agencies had long had an eye on Page, who they believed was subject to recruitment as a Russian agent as early as 2013. Second, even if the dossier was part of the application, the fact that it derives from opposition research wouldn’t bar the FBI from using it unless the bureau had reason to believe it was false and used it anyway.

Still, imagine for a moment that it is true that the FBI used only the Steele dossier to apply for the Page warrant, and that it acted improperly. Certainly, as I have noted elsewhere, this would not represent the first case of intelligence overreach in American history. That would be great news for Page’s defense, but it is hard to see how this would solve Trump’s broader problems. Page claims he was a bit player anyway. He also doesn’t make for a great political cause, given his peculiar and sometimes contradictory answers to questions from the House Intelligence Committee.