The drama in the whole #ReleaseTheMemo episode got ratcheted up yesterday when one of the assistant attorney generals, Stephen Boyd who heads the office of legislative liaison, sent Devin Nunes a hyperbolic memo basically predicting the end of Western Civilization should the House Intelligence Committee vote to let the public see the memo.

There are a couple of interesting parts to this. First, we were told by Adam Schiff and his fans that all this was was a compilation of the “best of” texts between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. This was bizarre on its face as the messages had largely been distributed to newsrooms across the nation and the memo was stored in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF). As a rule, you store as little stuff in a SCIF as you can because everything in a SCIF has controlled access and that is a pain to deal with.

The FBI had been whinging about the House Intelligence Committee not letting them see the memo and suddenly Justice was claiming the information was so sensitive that it would be “reckless” to declassify it. How does this work?

Overall the tone of the memo was smarmy and insulting. It was like a guy who had been Jeff Sessions’ spokes-toad was lecturing the Article I branch of government on how to use classified information and the danger of leaks…considering there have been 100+ leaks of classified information designed to harm Trump or his administration, resulting in at least 27 ongoing criminal investigations, this is sort of rich. In fact, it has a lot in common with the tack taken by Mark Warner:

This is the essence of the problem. All the information the House Intelligence Committee has was given to them by the FBI. So the FBI knows the parameters of what is in the memo. All they don’t know is exactly what the House is keying on. And without that information, they won’t be able to prepare a defense.
...

This also explains why they stonewalled on providing the information, to begin with. It does not help their cause. I think you can bet that if there was something in the documents that would have helped their case, they would not have been so reluctant to provide it to Congress. But it is quite remarkable that Sen. Warner would be critical of a document he has not bothered to read. The same goes to the other Democrats who see their Russian collusion case morphing into a case against the Obama DOJ.

With that, they also see their attempted coup attempt in great jeopardy.

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