“An absolute disgrace. It is an embarrassment to the United States Congress. It is part of an effort to discredit the investigation of the president. That is its only purpose, and it doesn’t even work on those terms.”

— Jeffrey Toobin, discussing on CNN the release of the Nunes memo.

Lawfare:”At the end of the day, the most important aspect of the #memo is probably not its contents but the fact that it was written and released at all. Its preparation and public dissemination represent a profound betrayal of the central premise of the intelligence oversight system. That system subjects the intelligence community to detailed congressional oversight, in which the agencies turn over their most sensitive secrets to their overseers in exchange for both a secure environment in which oversight can take place and a promise that overseers will not abuse their access for partisan political purposes. In other words, they receive legitimation when they act in accordance with law and policy.”

”Nunes, the Republican congressional leadership and Trump violated the core of that bargain over the course of the past few weeks. They revealed highly sensitive secrets by way of scoring partisan political points and delegitimizing what appears to have been lawful and appropriate intelligence community activity.”

New York Times: “After weeks of buildup, the three-and-a-half-page document about alleged F.B.I. abuses during the 2016 presidential campaign made public on Friday was broadly greeted with criticism, including by some Republicans. They said it cherry-picked information, made false assertions and was overly focused on an obscure, low-level Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page.”

“It didn’t live up to the hype.”

“But the campaign, captured in the hashtag #releasethememo, which was trending on Twitter for days, may have a far more significant impact than the memo’s contents… What began as an ember more than two weeks ago was fanned into a blaze by conservative media titans, presidential tweets and Republican lawmakers urging people to use social media to pressure Congress to make the memo’s contents public.”

Walter Shapiro: “Ever since Watergate, the standard for any scandal is whether there is a smoking gun left next to a corpse. In the case of the Nunes memo, we lack a body and the gun is a child’s toy pistol.”

Jonathan Chait: “Amid all the lies Donald Trump has told about the Russia scandal, there is one underlying truth: The intelligence community truly fears him and considers him unfit for the presidency. This is not because the intelligence community is traitorous, or left wing, or (as Donald Trump Jr. sneeringly put it) wine-spritzer-drinking elites. It is because the IC had early access to a wide array of terrifying intelligence linking Trump and his orbit to Russia. People who spend their lives protecting their country from foreign threats saw in Trump a candidate who had at some level been compromised by one of them.”

“Trump and his allies have viewed the causality the other way around. Because the IC distrusts Trump, its investigation of Trump’s connections to Russia is therefore illegitimate. Since his election, Trump has seized upon news of the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia as evidence that the investigators cannot be trusted. If they were unbiased, he reasons, they wouldn’t have been investigating Trump in the first place.”

“The newly released memo by Republican staff follows the tracks of this reasoning.”