The House Intelligence Committee voted along party lines Monday evening to release the now-infamous memo reportedly detailing abuses surrounding surveillance of at least one associate of then-candidate Donald Trump. The president and Justice Department have five days to review the memo before deciding to make it public or not.

We expect the memo will detail how the FBI used the Hillary Clinton-funded phony dossier on Trump to gain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (Act) (FISA) Court to surveil Carter Page, a former Trump aide who traveled to Russia in July 2016. Put another way, it’s very likely that corrupt deep state officials within the FBI used the opposition research of one political campaign, which just happened to be favored by the political campaign administration in power, to justify wielding the power of the state against an opposing political campaign. As we’ve noted before, that’s the stuff of banana republics, not constitutional ones.

“If you … want to know whether or not the dossier was used in court proceedings, whether or not it was vetted before it was used,” Rep. Trey Gowdy said, “if you are interested in who paid for the dossier … then, yes, you’ll want the memo to come out.”

Democrat reactions only reinforce our suspicions. “Today this committee voted to put the president’s personal interests, perhaps their own political interests, above the national interests,” complained the House committee’s ranking Democrat, Adam Schiff. No, that’s a Democrat specialty. Schiff also griped that the committee rejected releasing his counter memo. Except the committee did release that memo to the entire House, likely for public release soon thereafter.

Schiff also alleges that Democrats were made aware for the first time Monday of a House Intelligence Committee investigation into both the Justice Department and the FBI. Except that Intel subpoenaed both the DOJ and FBI in August for documents related to the dossier, which might have been a clue of an investigation. The DOJ and FBI also stonewalled on the subpoenas, likely, to borrow Schiff’s words, for “their own political interests.”

In short, the memo is probably not earth-shattering, but it will be an important marker in the interminably long saga of the Democrats’ phony Russia collusion narrative, as well as the corruption undermining the integrity of the FBI.

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi’s hysterics took the cake. Releasing the FISA memo, she declared, “is a distraction from the fact that [Republicans] passed a tax bill that gives 83% of the benefits to the top 1%. They’d like to distract from that. And 86 million middle-class Americans will pay more in taxes. … They do give this gift to corporate America at the expense of our children’s future. They don’t want to talk about that.”

Yes, Republicans do want to talk about the corruption among FBI leadership on behalf of Democrats, and thus this memo release is far from a distraction — that’s what Democrats specialize in. But Republicans would also love to talk about how millions of Americans are benefiting from tax reform, so thanks, Nancy, for bringing that back up. Just keep running against peace and prosperity and see how that works out for you.