The memo that Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee released to Fox News and the Washington Examiner on Friday morning—everyone else had to wait until noon—is four pages long. Its authors should have stopped at three pages, though, because the fourth serves only to undermine the entire theory of the case that Donald Trump and his supporters have been peddling for weeks now, which is that the Russia investigation is a partisan hit job engineered by the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Obama Administration, and anti-Trump elements inside the F.B.I.

To believe this conspiracy theory, which emanated from the likes of Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, and Tom Fitton, the head of the right-wing research group Judicial Watch, you have to believe that the investigation began with the infamous “Steele dossier,” the document compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British spy, which claims that the Russian government had been trying to cultivate Donald Trump for years and had obtained kompromat on him in the form of a sex tape. The right-wing argument goes that Clinton operatives cooked up a scandalous piece of fiction, got Steele to pass it along to some Trump-haters in the F.B.I., who then persuaded their bosses at the Justice Department to open an investigation, and here we are, eighteen months later, with Robert Mueller and his investigators hounding an innocent President.

The memo that was made public on Friday, whose release was pushed for by Representative Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, directly contradicts this story. Its first three pages are largely devoted to analyzing the context of the F.B.I.’s electronic surveillance of Carter Page, a former foreign-policy adviser to Trump. When, on October 21, 2016, the F.B.I. asked a secret intelligence court for permission to surveil Page, the memo alleges, the agency omitted “material and relevant information” from its request—for instance, the fact that the Steele dossier, which the government submitted in support of the application, had been commissioned and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. “Neither the initial application . . . nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior DOJ and FBI officials,” the memo says.

This is an interesting allegation, to be sure, and, as soon as the memo was released, Trump’s supporters were making much of it on Fox News and elsewhere. It should be noted, though, that some legal experts have already pointed out that the F.B.I. and the Justice Department weren’t under any legal obligation to inform the court about who paid for the dossier. On top of this, most of the information that the government did give to the court is still classified. FISA applications usually run to more than sixty pages. Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee have written a counter-memo, which they claim lays out what else the F.B.I. knew about Page when it applied to surveil him, but so far Republicans have refused to allow the minority party to release that document to the public. The F.B.I. seems likely to have pointed out to the court that Page, a frequent visitor to Russia, had been on the radar of its counterintelligence division for several years, and that two suspected Russian intelligence agents, one of whom the Justice Department subsequently charged, had tried to recruit him as a spy, in 2013.

But, even after reading only the Republicans’ memo, we can say two things. First, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department didn’t base their application to monitor Page entirely on Steele’s work. And, second, and more important, the Trump-Russia investigation didn’t begin with the Steele dossier. These two facts are there in that lonely paragraph on the fourth page of the Nunes memo. This is how it begins: “The Page FISA application also mentions information regarding fellow Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, but there is no evidence of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos. The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016 by FBI agent Peter Strzok.” In other words, the Trump-Russia probe began with an investigation of Papadopoulos, a young foreign-policy aide to the Trump campaign, who last year pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. A Times story in December provided basically the same account, but this isn’t a newspaper report: it is an official memo written by congressional staff members quoting a secret F.B.I. court filing. Far from confirming the conspiracy theory promoted by Trump, Hannity, and Fitton, the Nunes memo contradicts a central element of it. No wonder that some people in the White House, including the chief of staff, John Kelly, were reportedly less enthusiastic about releasing it than Trump was. (“Rising White House fear: Nunes Memo is a dud,” a headline at Axios read on Thursday.)

Yet, for the conspiracy theorists, the contents of the memo matter less than the support they’ve received recently from at least some elements of the Republican Party leadership, including Paul Ryan, the House Speaker, who earlier this week said the memo should be made public and talked about the need to “cleanse” the F.B.I. Trump is capable of anything. We know this from his firing of James Comey, last May, and his attempted firing of Mueller, last June, which was reportedly only thwarted when the White House counsel, Don McGahn, threatened to quit. If Trump uses the memo as a pretext to fire Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General, who oversees Mueller’s investigation, Ryan and other senior Republicans will be wholly complicit in causing a constitutional crisis.