[T]he one thing that keeps jumping out at me in all this is that it wouldn't even matter if all Nunes' claims were true and honestly argued. The underlying investigation is still completely valid, and no one's civil rights were violated. It's a point made very well at the Lawfare Blog:

To all of which, a reasonable person must ask: Huh? Indeed, if the above makes for difficult reading from which no particularly strong, let alone scandalous, narrative thread emerges, that's because the points recounted (assuming they are true) don't make out a coherent complaint.

To the extent that the complaint is that Page's civil liberties have been violated, the outraged are crying crocodile tears. For one thing, it is not at all clear that Page's civil liberties were, in fact, violated by the surveillance; the memo does not even purport to argue that the Justice Department lacked probable cause to support its warrant application. It does not suggest that Page was not, after all, an agent of a foreign power. What's more, the only clear violation of Page's civil liberties apparent here lies in the disclosure of the memo itself, which named him formally as a surveillance target and announced to the world at large that probable cause had been found to support his surveillance no fewer than four times by the court. Violating Page's civil liberties is a particularly strange way to complain about conduct that probably did not violate his civil liberties.

To the extent the complaint is that the FBI relied on a biased source in Steele, the FBI relies every day on information from far more dubious characters than former intelligence officers working for political parties. The FBI gets information from narco-traffickers, mobsters and terrorists. Surely it's not scandalous for it to get information from a Democrat--much less from a former British intelligence officer working for Democrats, even if he expresses dislike of a presidential candidate.

It's remarkable. Few want to go down the road of making this argument because it's much easier to point to the myriad inaccuracies in the memo. That makes sense, but ignoring the thrust of the memo's implication is a problem. Either the Republican argument is riotously funny, or it's deeply chilling-and it's hard to know which.

Nunes and crew are trying to maintain that if, say, a politically liberal FBI agent got information from a credible source who also happened to be politically liberal about potential criminal activity by a conservative target and obtained a surveillance warrant based on that information, then everything that came by way of that surveillance would be fruit of a rotten tree.

Ummm....what?