It’s one small piece of the puzzle. Only disclosure can counter the leakfest.

Blech. Let me get that out of the way before writing again about the Trump-Russia controversy in light of Friday’s release of the Nunes memo. Still, the subject seems worth addressing. Ignore hysterically partisan reporters who hysterically insist the memo is a partisan artifact. Of course it is. Partisan motivation lies behind the Democratic flogging of the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory. Partisan motivation lies behind the Republican pushback. Ignore the media blather that the memo somehow represents a Republican Party stab in the back of its former law-enforcement allies. Support for law enforcement will always be a GOP talking point, as it is for the vast majority of Democrats. But it’s also completely normal for one party to hold federal agencies accountable for actions when the other party was in control.

The memo provides a tiny piece of a puzzle most of whose pieces are still missing. We know for certain now that the U.S. government in October 2016 used the Christopher Steele dossier, financed by the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party, to win a court’s approval for surveillance of Trump campaign figure Carter Page. But Mr. Steele was a foreign citizen and presented his findings to the FBI in July 2016. From that point if not earlier, did U.S. agencies monitor his communications? They continue to describe the dossier claims as unverified. Do the agencies know more? They almost certainly do, quite possibly including the identities of Mr. Steele’s alleged Russian informants. We know only from reported leaks a key factor behind James Comey’s intervention in the Hillary Clinton email case, though the basic outlines of the story were confirmed on CBS’s “Face the Nation” by Sen. Lindsey Graham. To wit, the FBI’s unprecedented, protocol-defying decision to clear Mrs. Clinton was driven partly by a bit of Russian intelligence. When will the U.S. public be told the full story?

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