Later this week, when he finally finishes reading it, Donald Trump is expected to release House Democrats’ “pretty lengthy” 10-page response to the Nunes memo, opening a second act in a bit of political theater that has consumed Washington. The Democratic rebuttal is unlikely to penetrate the conservative-media ecosystem where Devin Nunes’s allegations of F.B.I. bias are being treated like the Pentagon Papers. Still, at least one Republican is in a state of agitation over the document. Not because it will invalidate the Nunes memo, which was declared a dud as soon as it was made public, but because Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, appears to be outplaying Nunes at his own game.

Nunes, after weeks of buildup, learned the hard way that the hype cycle turns parabolic if you can’t deliver the goods. Schiff, on the other hand, seems to be laying the groundwork to keep the mystery surrounding his counter-argument alive—and to undermine the Republican claim that Memo-gate is all about transparency. “To say, ‘we don’t want the country to see this’ is untenable. What I’m more concerned about,” Schiff told CNN on Tuesday, “is that they make political redactions. That is, not redactions to protect sources or methods, which we’ve asked the Department of Justice and the F.B.I. to do, but redactions to remove information they think is unfavorable to the president.”

Redacting parts of the Democratic rebuttal, of course, would play right into Schiff’s hands—an outcome Rep. Trey Gowdy suspects Schiff is setting up on purpose. “I think the Democrats are politically smart enough to put things in the memo that require either the [F.B.I.] or the Department of Justice to say it needs to be redacted,” Gowdy, who cut his teeth running the Benghazi and Clinton e-mail hearings, told Fox News on Tuesday night. “Unfortunately, we are in an environment where you would include material that you know has to be redacted and you know responsible people are going to redact it just so that question will be asked.”

Gowdy isn’t wrong to argue that Schiff and his fellow Democrats have a political agenda. At its core, Memo-gate is little more than a media spectacle overlaying a political debate about classified information that Americans—and indeed, most lawmakers—don’t have access to. Releasing the actual FISA application to surveil Trump associate Carter Page would instantly clear up the extent to which the F.B.I. relied on the Steele dossier, as well as any other evidence the bureau had that Page was acting as an agent of the Russian government. The primary argument against full transparency—again, the putative reason for the Republican campaign against the F.B.I.—is that it would reveal classified sources and methods. The FISA process itself is closely guarded. But it is also likely to reveal that the bureau had good reason to surveil Page. Any time a FISA warrant is renewed, law enforcement officials have to prove that their surveillance yielded actionable intelligence. The Page warrant was renewed three times. So, while the Democratic rebuttal to Nunes would also function as a partisan document, it is likely that any sensitive information redacted by Trump would be inculpatory.

Gowdy, as the only Republican on the House Intelligence Committee to have seen the warrant applications, is surely aware of this fact. It’s why he blew a hole in Trump’s claim last week, that the Nunes memo “totally vindicates” him, when he declared that the report in no way discredited Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. And it’s why he’s already floating concerns about potential redactions. Propriety prevents either party from leaking details of the application itself, forcing Republicans and Democrats to fight over shadows on the wall. Schiff, if he is indeed setting the chessboard to make Trump look like he’s hiding the truth, will have outflanked Nunes. That might not matter in the long run, given the performative aspect of the debate. But Gowdy’s warning on Fox looks like a tell.