Adam Schiff, Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, among seemingly dozens of Democrats, not to mention half the mainstream media, had been warning us for days that the release of the memo authored by Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee would place our national security at grave risk. “Sources and methods” would be revealed.

Now that we have seen the memo, it’s clear that was an absolutely bald-faced lie of the most obvious sort. Nothing in it impacts national security in the slightest. There’s no mention whatsoever of any “sources and methods.”

Unless they were lobotomized, those Democrats and their dependable PR team (aka the media) must have realized they were blatantly lying to the American public. Evidently, they didn’t care. How’re we now supposed to trust what these people say about anything? Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.

Their latest meme is “cherry picking.” The memo was cherry-picked and therefore to be ignored. That’s like saying a murderer who has a clean driving record and is a good cook is not a murderer. Whatever else happened, the FBI clearly used a slanderous fictional document to get a FISA ruling to surveil Carter Page without telling the court the document was a pack of lies paid for by the Clinton campaign and written by a creepy spy with old-line Soviet connections. And they did it multiple times.

So what was up here below the surface? It can’t just be the “evil party” trying to live up to its nickname, although that certainly happened.

It seems this particular lie was a last line of defense — for now — against a coming potential Armageddon for their party. This memo, bad as it is, is apparently only the first of many, a small percentage of what is to come. And the Democrats know it.

Fear is operative. Maybe panic. An entire weltanschauung is under threat — jobs, friends, self-image, who knows what. If this goes on much longer and much more comes out, some Democrats -—not apparatchik Schiff, needless to say, but others — might have to face reality and say something. A few journalists (not at CNN, but maybe someplace else) might have to report the truth. It happened with Watergate. Republicans turned against Nixon. But, of course, they’re “the stupid party.”

But speaking of stupid, something else occurred that few are mentioning, but may be of more significance than anything. What were these FISA judges thinking who allowed for the surveillance? They actually read the Steele dossier, one would assume. Were they imbeciles or as biased as McCabe, Strzok and the rest of that seedy FBI cabal? Whether they were told that document came from the Clinton campaign or not, it read like an outtake from the back pages of the National Enquirer — and not one of the good issues (John Edwards, etc.). The dossier was ludicrous on its face, yet the supposedly great legal minds of the FISA court accepted it as what appears to be the most important evidence for the case.

Think about that.

What we need, obviously, is the old word transparency. The public needs to see the full details of what went into the FISA decisions — and we don’t need to hear any of that fake palaver about national security. Everybody’s security depends on the FISA court working in a one-hundred percent unbiased manner. Otherwise we’re living a nightmare.

That court, and its workings, and its personnel should be a key part of any investigation going forward. New rules and regulations have to be put in place.

FINALLY: Looking good in all this is Senator Rand Paul. He warned us about our fragile privacy. Looking especially bad, the American Civil Liberties Union who are defecating on their charter. Looking even worse: Barack Obama. He led the charge to turn the intelligence agencies against the people. Looking lost — Robert Mueller. How will he get half the country to believe anything he says at this point?

Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media. His latest book is I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already.