Everyone at this point has probably had time to absorb the memo and regurgitate their observations. It’s 4-pages, so it’s not a lot.

You’ll be seeing a lot of hot takes for the next week, and you can just about count on them all being drawn down party lines.

Here’s a fresh one:

Former Bush-era Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez is turning his nose up at the memo. Gonzalez knows a bit about controversial memos. He previously penned a memo on the treatment of prisoners during the Iraq war and called parts of the Geneva Convention on POWs “outdated.”

Fun times.

Said Gonzalez:

“I have no confidence whatsoever in what’s going to come out of the House,” the former attorney general under George W. Bush told Time magazine, adding, “Nunes seems to be part of the Trump team.”

OH – you can say that with feeling!

Nunes has been groveling for Trump’s crumbs of approval since before the election. Nothing about this is a surprise.

What the memo ultimately shows is that there was some sloppy work from the upper management levels of the DOJ and FBI, but there’s nothing in it to suggest a plot to bring down Trump.

In fact, the closest it comes to saying anything of the sort is to note that the author of the Fusion GPS dossier, Christopher Steele was adamant that Trump should not be president.

That’s not a shock. That was actually something that came out a year ago, when the dossier was first revealed. Steele felt that Trump was so susceptible to being compromised by the Kremlin that to elect him would put the U.S. on very shaky ground. He was desperate that people look at the work he’d done with the dossier and make the information known to somebody.

That’s part of the info that is left out of this very misleading memo.

Also left out is that while the initial FISA application was filed on Carter Page, a former Trump campaign aide, it was filed a month after Page had left Trump’s campaign, so the idea that it was being used to spy on Trump’s team is ridiculous.

But then, there was the “coffee boy,” George Papadopoulos. The memo points out his involvement (but he was just a coffee boy…). The FBI began an investigation into his activities in March, long before the Page investigation.

It’s a partisan mess, and Nunes and every Republican lawmaker that built this up to be something more than it is should be ashamed of themselves.