The House is moving closer and closer to releasing a memo compiled by staffers of the House Intelligence Committee. The memo, as I’ve posted before, covers two areas.

First, it deals with alleged systematic abuse of FISA in order to place political opponents under surveillance. This is not news to anyone who paid a scintilla of attention during the Obama administration. These include persons a disparate as opponents of the Iran deal, investigative journalists, and even Dennis Kucinich. We know that our UN Ambassador directed the unmasking of the identities of Americans swept up by legitimate FISA surveillance at a rate in excess of one per business day.

The second part of the memo deals with alleged bias and prejudice on the part of some senior FBI personnel against then-candidate Donald Trump. This includes evidence that the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton was shaped by the fact that Trump won the nomination and not by the facts.

So far the media reaction has been to ignore it and the reaction on the part of the left and a goodly number of Trump opponents who claim to be of the right is to say that the higher profile people involved–Devin Nunes, Mark Meadow, and Jim Jordan–are all pro-Trump stooges. This, of course, begs the question of why anyone would object to the release of this memo if these people were just going to embarrass themselves.

Now others have joined the fray. Trey Gowdy and Texas Republican John Ratcliffe were on FoxNews

Via RealClearPolitics:

“We know that Strzok and Page had an intense anti-Trump bias,” he said. “And that’s OK, so long as they check it at the door and do their job. We learned today in the thousands of text messages we have reviewed, that perhaps they may not have done that. We know about this ‘insurance policy’ that was referenced trying to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.”

Ratcliffe continued: “We learned today about information that in the immediate aftermath of his election, there may have been a ‘secret society’ of folks within the Department of Justice and the FBI, to include Page and Strzok, working against him. I’m not saying that actually happened, but when folks speak in those terms, they need to come forward to explain the context.”

About the “secret society,” Gowdy said: “You have this insurance policy in Spring 2016, and then the day after the election, what they really didn’t want to have happen, there is a text exchange between these two FBI agents, these supposed to be fact-centric FBI agents saying, ‘Perhaps this is the first meeting of the secret society.’ So I’m going to want to know what secret society you are talking about, because you’re supposed to be investigating objectively the person who just won the electoral college. So yeah — I’m going to want to know.”

More via FoxNews:

According to Gowdy, the messages included a reference to a “secret society” within the Department of Justice and the FBI the day after Trump won election in November 2016.

“It’s the day after the election and it’s the same two people who were discussing a little bit later in the texts the damage they had done with the Clinton investigation and how they could ‘fix it’ and make it right,” Gowdy said. “That is a level of bias that is stunning among law enforcement officers.”

He added that the texts also reveal Strzok was only interested in pursuing the Russia investigation if there is “something there,” and he had no desire in clearing President Trump of wrongdoing.

“I don’t know how much damage they did. It’s really not my job to prove that. That’s [Inspector General] Michael Horowitz and Jeff Sessions’ job to find out much damage these two agents and others did,” Gowdy said. “But I care about about the Department of Justice and the FBI, and it breaks my heart that we are having to have this conversation about two agents that only wanted to get the president, they didn’t have any interest in clearing him.”

Keep in mind that last month, when Devin Nunes was on the verge of citing Rod Rosenstein and Christopher Wray for contempt of Congress, Gowdy was opposed to the idea saying, “I’m interested in getting access to the information and not the drama.”

The “secret society” thing could mean nothing…or it could mean a lot. In this case, the messenger is the message because Gowdy does not have a reputation for running off half-cocked and eventually looking like a fool. When one further notes that some five months of text messages that have been lost– that gap, coincidentally, begins the day after a “secret society is mentioned and ends on May 17, the day that Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel–there is simply too much smoke to not call the fire department to find out what in the hell is going on.

I have no doubt, though, that the same people that have carried water for Robert Mueller and this ridiculous “collusion” narrative are going to suddenly discover that Gowdy is just another Trumpian stooge.