Did anyone who isn’t a news junkie know that Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) finally released his rebuttal to the Nunes memo on Saturday? Yes, the long-anticipated Democrat memo was set free so the truth would be finally known! Or not.

In the memo? No bang. Not even a whimper. Mostly whining.

Dem FISA memo in brief:
Everything that would be really useful to know is still redacted;

Everything that is left is partisan whining and talking points from Schiff https://t.co/7yabQPJhBF

— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) February 24, 2018

And released on a Saturday? Rep. Devin Nunes was speaking at CPAC, the media is still completely consumed with the Parkland school shooting, and no one is paying attention.

The entire memo can be read here, if you are so inclined.

Minority Memo After OCR – House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence by larryseltzer on Scribd

But there is nothing earth-shattering in it. The Democrats were in charge of redacting the classified information out of it, after the President refused to release it as it was after Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein and FBI Director Wray pointed out passages that “concerned” them.

While others more invested in the legal twists and turns have analyzed the memo for the information it does contain, one thing seems to float to the top over and over again. And that is that the dossier that Fusion GPS created was used – though the Democrat memo says only for a teensy tiny bit! – to obtain the FISA warrant.

The FBI and the Justice Department heavily relied on the Steele dossier’s uncorroborated allegations. You know this is true because, notwithstanding the claim that “only narrow use” was made “of information from Steele’s sources,” the Democrats end up acknowledging that “only narrow use” actually means significant use — as in, the dossier was the sine qua non of the warrant application. The memo concedes that the FISA-warrant application relied on allegations by Steele’s anonymous Russian hearsay sources that:

Page met separately while in Russia with Igor Sechin, a close associate of Vladimir Putin and executive chairman of Roseneft, Russia’s state-owned oil company, and Igor Divyekin, a senior Kremlin official. Sechin allegedly discussed the prospect of future U.S.-Russia energy cooperation and “an associated move to lift Ukraine-related western sanctions against Russia.” Divyekin allegedly disclosed to Page that the Kremlin possessed compromising information on Clinton (“kompromat”) and noted the possibility of its being released to Candidate #1’s [i.e., Donald Trump’s] campaign. . . . This closely tracks what other Russian contacts were informing another Trump foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos.

And then there was this. No wonder Schiff wanted to toss this out on a Saturday afternoon.

Next, Schiff — again, hilariously enough to make you wonder if it’s done tongue-in-cheek — accuses Nunes of hypocrisy for condemning the omission of Mrs. Clinton’s name after having rebuked the Obama administration’s “unmasking” of American names. Of course, the two things have nothing to do with each other.

“Unmasking” refers to the revelation of American identities in intelligence reports. These are Americans who, though not targeted as foreign agents, are incidentally intercepted in surveillance. In marked contrast, we are talking here about a FISA warrant application, not an intelligence report. In a warrant application, it is the DOJ’s honorable practice, and the judiciary’s expectation, that the court must be informed about the material biases of the sources of the factual allegations that the DOJ claims amount to probable cause.

As the Democrats’ own excerpt from the FISA application illustrates, unmasking has nothing to do with it, because there is no need to use names at all: Note that Simpson is referred to as “an identified U.S. person”; Perkins-Coie is referred to as “a U.S.-based law firm.” The dispute here is not about the failure to use the words “Hillary Clinton.” They could have referred to “Candidate #2.” To state that “Candidate #2” had commissioned Steele’s research would have been just as easy and every bit as appropriate as the DOJ’s reference to a “Candidate #1,” who might have “ties to Russia.” Had DOJ done the former, it would not have “unmasked” Hillary Clinton any more than Donald Trump was unmasked by DOJ’s description of him as “Candidate #1”; but it would have been being “transparent” with the FISA court. By omitting any reference to Clinton, the DOJ was being the opposite of transparent.

Schiff is trying to spin this as best as he can, but he isn’t exactly headlining any news shows with his memo.

If the memo had really contained something of huge importance that the Republicans had deliberately omitted from their memo, the Democrats would have done two things:
1) Quickly redacted what they needed to in order to put it out in the public sphere (they waited two full weeks to do this), and
2) Not released it on a Saturday afternoon in the middle of a very hyper-focused news cycle.

By their actions, Democrats have indicated that they don’t have anything but nitpicking of the Nunes memo to complain about. No wonder the release of this memo was a unanimous vote by Republicans and Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee. The Republicans knew they had nothing to lose with the release of the Democrat memo. Why bother fighting something you know won’t end up harming you?