On Friday, after what seemed like eight years of Republican politicians and right-wing pundits telling us that The Memo's explosive contents would bring down Robert Mueller's Russia investigation once and for all, the House Intelligence Committee released it for public consumption. The document is, to put it charitably, a bafflingly underwhelming one that contains almost no new revelations beyond those which have been reported and dissected many times over. It's a dud.

As we knew, The Memo is primarily concerned with scrutinizing the relationship between the Clinton campaign and Christopher Steele, the ex-British spy hired to conduct opposition research on Donald Trump before the 2016 election. Although information from the "Steele dossier" made it into a FISA warrant application targeting Trump campaign official Carter Page, the FBI and the Justice Department did not disclose the dossier's funding source, which means, the Memo concludes without further explanation, that the entire Russia probe must therefore be tainted. It further alleges that former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe testified that the Bureau would not have sought the warrant but for what they learned from the dossier—a new claim, but one that House Democrats are already disputing.

Then, after spending three pages twisting himself into a logical pretzel to portray the dossier as the root of a corrupt investigation, Nunes ends The Memo by accidentally (?) confirming what law enforcement has been saying all along: that the investigation was not triggered by the Steele dossier, and that it began before the allegedly groundless FISA request ever happened.