Ken Cuccinelli II, a CNN legal expert, has litigated in the FISC. He is the president of the Senate Conservatives Fund and former attorney general of Virginia. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) Democrats and Republicans are recharging their hyperbole to open fire again over the Nunes memo. But there is a second part of this story we should not ignore. America's secret surveillance of its own citizens has been abused and the Nunes memo gives us a chance to ask ourselves: "What power should any administration -- whether it's Democrat or Republican -- have to spy on Americans? Shouldn't judges protect us from this abuse?"

Ken Cuccinelli

It takes Hollywood's most creative conspiracy-theory scripts -- think "The Manchurian Candidate" -- to reach the level of interference in a presidential campaign that occurred in the 2016 presidential election.

The Nunes memo opens the door to Monday-morning quarterbacking of the decisions made primarily by the FBI in 2016. There were decisions in the election runup that Republicans are upset about (e.g., spying on Donald Trump's campaign based on Hillary Clinton-funded opposition research) and decisions Democrats are upset about (e.g., the on-again, off-again, on-again investigations involving Hillary Clinton).

Monday-morning quarterbacking is, of course, what sloppily passes for accountability in a constitutional republic. And in this super-secret area of policy, it presents a rare opportunity for the public to have a peek.

The Nunes memo accuses the FBI of using the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process to spy indirectly on the Trump campaign based on very flimsy information related to Carter Page, a former Trump campaign aide who had left the Trump campaign the month before the FBI pursued the FISA warrant.