Gertrude Stein once said of her hometown of Oakland, Calif., “There is no there there.” That about says it for Devin Nunes’s notorious memo, too.

By this I do not mean that Nunes, the California Republican and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has uncovered no potential wrongdoing in his three-and-a-half-page memo, which was declassified Friday over vehement objections from senior F.B.I. and Justice Department officials. More about the possible wrongdoing in a moment.

The important questions, however, are:

First, did the F.B.I. have solid reasons to suspect that people in Donald Trump’s campaign had unusual, dangerous and possibly criminal ties to Moscow?

Second, did this suspicion warrant surveillance and investigation by the F.B.I.?

The answers are yes and yes, and nothing in the Nunes memo changes that — except to provide the president with a misleading pretext to fire deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein and discredit Robert Mueller’s probe.