Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer

x The US intel community has concluded, & members of TrumpÃ¢ÂÂs cabinet agree, that the Russians interfered in our election & plan to do so again. AmericaÃ¢ÂÂs national security is under attack. Why wonÃ¢ÂÂt the President put our country before his personal & political interests? — Nancy Pelosi (@NancyPelosi) February 10, 2018

Eventually, the nation will probably get to see a redacted version of the 10-page Democratic classified memo rebutting Republican claims in the 4-page memo produced by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes in which he wrote that the FBI committed serious abuses of its authority as it sought evidence regarding Russian meddling in the 2016 election. In fact, there's a good possibility it could be released next week.

Pr*sident Donald Trump eagerly released the Nunes memo a week ago Friday. Democrats called it “profoundly misleading.” Many Republicans, on the other hand, took it at face value, seeing it as a chance to go after the FBI as a partisan agency with an anti-Trump bias.

For now, thanks to Trump’s decision this Friday not to release the Democratic memo without changes allegedly related to sensitive intelligence matters, we only get to see his hypocrisy and that of the Republicans. I know, I know, the supply of GOP hypocrisy reached the saturation point long, long ago, and mere mention of it these days is almost criminally redundant. And yet its excremental flow continues, unabated.

In a statement, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer said:

“The President’s double standard when it comes to transparency is appalling. The rationale for releasing the Nunes memo, transparency, vanishes when it could show information that’s harmful to him. Millions of Americans are asking one simple question: what is he hiding?”

Indeed. Schumer could have substituted or added another word: cover-up. That’s the stink whose aroma has been growing for months.

The Republicans could easily have avoided the criticisms they’re getting for this particular edition of their hypocrisy. Both the Nunes memo and the Democratic rebuttal memo produced by Democrat Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, could have been released simultaneously to let the nation’s press and people examine them side-by-side. But that would have demonstrated clearly just how much Nunes is willing to twist things—mostly but not exclusively by omitting facts and nuance—to favor the interests of the squatter now occupying 1600 Pennsylvania. The squatter who has repeatedly labeled the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller III into Russian meddling and possible collusion by himself and his minions as a “witch-hunt.”

But instead, House Republicans voted nearly two weeks ago to release the Nunes memo but not the Democratic memo. All the better to get their fabricated version of what the FBI did to the public and their propaganda outlets with only hints about what’s in the countervailing memo.

Reluctantly, after a storm of criticism, last Monday all the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee joined all the Democrats in voting to release the Schiff memo. And, for a little while Friday, amid another day of wild gyrations on the stock market, it appeared Trump was actually going to release it. But in the early evening, the announcement was made. No release until the Department of Justice offers its judgments about what should be removed from the memo before the public sees it.