So yesterday the memo from the House Intelligence Committee Democrats was finally released, and yes it essentially refutes every false claim made in the Republican memo.

The Democratic memo is out. It claims that the Nunes memo was a “transparent effort to undermine” DOJ and FBI and special counsel’s probe. https://t.co/ozrui1yKii pic.twitter.com/JzzuNHiqMq

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) February 24, 2018

So here is the pdf of the memo if you want to read it for yourself.

But here is what we have essentially learned:

• Steele Dossier played NO role in opening the Carter Page investigation. They began their investigation prior to even receiving it. 
• The DOJ did in fact inform the court of the origin of the Steele Dossier. 
• They accuse Nunes of deliberately misrepresenting the underlying FISA Warrant intelligence. 
• Four different judge's approved FISA warrants including judge's appointed by Bush and Reagan. Multiple DOJ officials also approved the applications prior to the court even seeing them including Trump appointees Rosenstein and Boente. 
• They actually started listening to Page after he left Trump campaign so the idea they were watching him to spy on Trump is absurd. 
• Page has a long history with Russia going back to 2004 and was being actively investigated once before already in 2013. The FBI had even interviewed him in 2016 again prior to receiving the Steele Dossier. The Steele dossier was referenced in the application as corroboration of certain things, and not to independently demonstrate. 
• A bunch of blacked out additional evidence with a bit in the middle noting Page lied to the HIC in his testimony in 2017 about meeting with Russian officials. 
• It included the footnote that discusses the Steele dossier source which SPECIFICALLY STATES ..."The FBI speculates the the unidentified U.S. Person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1's campaign." Candidate 1 is Trump I believe, edit I previously thought Person 1 was Steele, this is the person coordinating with Steele. Steele is Source #1. 
• DOJ timely informed the court when the FBI fired Steele and why. 
• The attacks on Bruce Ohr for knowing Steele/and his wife working for Fusion GPS are 100% baseless. He was not involved in the FISA process and disclosed his relationships in November 2016. 

Basically Nunes and Gowdy lied whole cloth that the FISA warrant was primarily based on a news article and the Steele Dossier. Those were in fact the least used and most minor pieces of evidence and they picked them out specifically for that reason to discredit the investigation and lied about their use.

That last part I think we all essentially recognized from the get go.

Nunes is either a Russian agent himself, or somehow compromised, and Gowdy is just a conspiracy theory chasing POS.

Here were the final few paragraphs from the New York Times write up on this memo: 

The wiretap of Mr. Page generated useful intelligence. 

When the Justice Department repeatedly sought the court’s permission to renew the surveillance of Mr. Page, the Democratic memo said, it cited new information it was gathering through the wiretap. 

“The court-approved surveillance of Page allowed F.B.I. to collect valuable intelligence,” the Democratic memo said. It asserted that the repeated renewals “demonstrate that the F.B.I. collected important investigative information and leads by conducting court-approved surveillance.” 

What that intelligence was, however, was redacted.

The memo released by the Republicans of course suggested that the FISA warrants issued on Carter Page were illegal and unnecessary, and this memo completely refutes that argument.

What's more is that when Mueller releases his report on all of this, we are likely going to know what was learned through these warrants.

That means the House Republicans were counting on their memo derailing an investigation that they had to know would ultimately prove that they were running interference for Donald Trump.

Speaking of Donald Trump he was all over Twitter yesterday trying to refute the findings in this memo.

Mostly he was posting snippets from his insane conversation with Jeanine Pirro. But there were other attempts to discredit the memo as well,

Here was one such attempt being refuted in real time:

Holy moly. The @FoxNews anchor said "Congressman Schiff, he ARGUES the REPUBLICAN memo omitted and distorted key facts." Trump just deleted 5 words from the quote to allege the opposite meaning. https://t.co/UlSQUcc0bD

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) February 25, 2018

I think that kind of sums up Trump's pathetic attempts to save his ass.