But still. It was a moment of adult supervision where questions were asked, answers were given, and facts were facts. These days, that’s a big deal. Over on the House side of Capitol Hill, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has managed to bring oversight to a dangerous new low. Weak oversight is bad, and we have lived with it for a long time. But Nunes is creating something much different and much worse: fake oversight.

For months now, Nunes—who served on the Trump transition team—has been behaving like a teenager who so desperately wants to be liked by the cool kid in the Oval Office, he’ll do anything and break everything. First there was his bizarre “midnight run” to the White House where he purportedly viewed classified documents, refused to share them with his own committee, and then held a solo press conference on the White House lawn to insinuate that the Obama administration may have improperly spied on the Trump transition team. “What I’ve read seems to me to be some level of surveillance activity—perhaps legal, but I don’t know that it’s right,” Nunes told reporters. Nunes was temporarily forced to step down from his own committee’s Russia investigation after the House ethics committee launched an inquiry into whether he had revealed classified information. No proof of improper eavesdropping ever surfaced.

Then came his January memo—a cherry-picked document designed for one and only one purpose: to discredit Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 election by casting doubt on the “legitimacy and legality” of the FBI’s application for a surveillance order on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. The memo alleged that the FBI concealed the politically motivated origins of information it submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court. The memo also alleged that the information in question—a dossier compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, who had been hired by a firm working on behalf of anti-Trump Republicans and then the Democratic National Committee—was the shaky and shady foundation for the Trump-Russia investigation. The implication: Biased Bureau officials had it out for Trump.

The Cool Kid loved it. “This memo totally vindicates ‘Trump’ in probe,” tweeted Trump. In reality, the president wasn’t vindicated at all. The memo itself acknowledged the FBI’s Russia investigation began with a different Trump adviser months before the Steele dossier came into play. And we now know that the FBI did disclose the political origins of the Steele dossier to the court in its request. But the Nunes memo had done its job, surrounding the truth in a swirl of doubt.

To be fair, congressional oversight has rarely won any gold medals. Until the 1970s, the congressional intelligence committees didn’t even exist. “Oversight” consisted of a handful of legislators who met a few times a year, informally and in secret. They did not ask questions and did not get answers. “It is not a question of reluctance on the part of the CIA officials to speak to us,” noted Republican Senator Leverett Saltonstall in 1956. “Instead it is a question of our reluctance, if you will, to seek information and knowledge on subjects which I personally, as a member of Congress and as a citizen, would rather not have.”