It would be easy to compare Congressman Devin Nunes’s release of a declassified memo on purported surveillance abuses to Geraldo Rivera opening Al Capone’s vault. But this would be extremely unfair to Geraldo, who didn’t know ahead of time that it would be empty.

The four-page memo was drafted by House Intelligence Committee staffers with access to highly classified information about an ongoing criminal investigation into foreign interference in the last presidential election. By Nunes’s account, they uncovered evidence that officials in the FBI and Justice Department abused surveillance powers to spy on Trump campaign staffer Carter Page. “The committee has discovered serious violations of the public trust, and the American people have a right to know when officials in crucial institutions are abusing their authority for political purposes,” Nunes said. “Our intelligence and law enforcement agencies exist to defend the American people, not to be exploited to target one group on behalf of another.”

Against the wishes of his FBI director, Christopher Wray, President Donald Trump approved the release of the previously top-secret memo in the hopes that it would discredit the Russia investigation. But the much-hyped document falls far short of what its backers claimed. As the FBI and House Democrats warned, the memo is also riddled with selective omissions that distort its portrayal of events. And yet, in an ironic twist, it also confirms certain details about the investigation that undercut Trump’s defenses against the accusations he faces.

The memo alleges that former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele—who prepared the infamous dossier of damaging allegations against Trump—was biased against Trump because the consulting firm that funded the dossier, Fusion GPS, was paid for by a law firm hired by the Clinton campaign. Accordingly, the memo alleges that the FBI wrongly withheld Steele’s bias from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court when, based partly on the dossier, it sought a surveillance order against former Trump foreign policy aide Carter Page. The broader, unstated implication is that the entire Russia investigation is tainted by partisanship.

It’s been reported for months that the FBI used the dossier in the investigation and initial FISA warrant application in October 2016, and that Steele’s work could be traced back to Democratic funding. But the memo largely elides two key facts. One is that Page had well-established contacts with Russian intelligence figures long before he joined the Trump campaign, making the choice to surveil him less random than it seems. The other is that the Russia investigation actually began well before Steele contacted the FBI or the FISA application targeting Page was drafted. Federal investigators started probing the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia in May 2016 after an Australian diplomat told them about troubling conversations he had with George Papadopoulos, the Trump foreign-policy staffer who signed a plea deal with Mueller last fall.