There are four precincts being heard in determining what’s best for our country vis-à-vis releasing the memo.

First, Devon Nunes, one of the document’s authors, and the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee that voted to release it. A Republican and a partisan, Nunes seems out of his depth both procedurally and politically in managing this committee’s yearlong effort into an array of overlapping issues. His springtime gaff in preemptively sharing classified intelligence learned from White House sources during the short-lived “unmasking scandal” made him appear somewhat unhinged and resulted in his temporary recusal from the committee he chairs. He thinks the American people need to see this memo and stands by every word as unshakable fact.

Second, Nunes’ counterpart, Adam Schiff, is a California Democrat, which instinctively has one cast a wary eye. He has denigrated every effort by the committee and its chairman to bring about any consensus conclusion. The stonewalling of the Deep State in its withholding of documents and failure to produce witnesses goes unaddressed by Schiff. Instead, he obsesses to every open mic that the committee’s work has proceeded solely to undermine the Mueller investigation into Trump campaign collusion with Russia, making one unsubstantiated charge after another. He says the memo is a pack of lies and should not be released for fear it will compromise national security. He is preparing his own memo for release.

The third arbiter, of course, is the Executive Branch and the President has been unambiguous in his thinking that the memo should be released. After all, he has read it, he knows there is nothing in it damaging to him, and he knows its content will cast his antagonists at Justice and the FBI in an unfavorable light. Win, win. But not really; because if the release somehow does derail Mueller by demonstrating the Mueller probe was born of an underhanded bias and criminal manipulation of the FISA Court, then Mueller could be disbanded. Trump would never be vindicated, and cries from the left that Trump cheated justice will reverberate throughout the mid-terms, and the Democrats will campaign for the House with the argument that impeachment is the last vestige of remedy. And the Trump-haters will buy it

Lastly, we have the DOJ and the FBI. They, too, do not support release, claiming that the document contains”inaccuracies and omissions” harmful to national security and the government institutions (i.e. Justice and the FBI) that protect us. Ironically, it is purported the memo makes a case that the FBI and Justice Department colluded in presenting evidence to a FISA Court that contains “inaccuracies and omissions” to mislead the court into granting a warrant to electronically surveil one Carter Page, an American citizen with business interests in Russia who held an advisory role on the periphery of the Trump campaign. Should these charges be proven correct, then those responsible for FISA Court abuses, possibly Bruce Ohr at Justice and James Comey, Andrew McCabe, et al at the FBI, could face criminal charges. So asking Ohr’s boss, Rod Rosenstein, and McCabe’s boss, Christopher Wray, to pass judgment on the providence of releasing this memo is as suspect as the three competing agendas detailed above.

Now the voice yet to be heard should be the loudest: the media. Perhaps if Tom Hanks were really the editor of the Washington Post, as in the big screen’s salute to journalistic integrity, The Post, he could bring some Ben Bradlee-esque gravitas to this conundrum. After all, it was the Washington Post and the New York Times that railed for the release of the Pentagon Papers, a document thought to be damaging to the nation’s security as well, in wartime no less! But here, silence. Even the potential for government abuse that is being bandied about: spying on Americans and lying to the court; malfeasance at the FBI and Justice Department, a Deep State leveraging of surveillance assets for political gain, at the height of a presidential election no less; the harbinger of a looming constitutional crisis resulting from a special counsel; why, there’s not a mystery novelist born who wouldn’t take a crack at this one. And yet, crickets from the journalist elites.

And to revisit the topic of the FBI for a minute, isn’t it time we rid ourselves of the J Edgar Hoover fairy tale? This was a man who secretly spied and collected dirt to muzzle his critics and build an unassailable position of power in government. It is Hoover’s DNA that runs through the Bureau, and it is that legacy of absolute power corrupting absolutely that we may be seeing manifested today.

Since we’re so mindful of taking down statues and memorials, perhaps we should think about renaming the FBI Building, instead of commemorating the Father of the Deep State. Maybe one day (and for good reason) it will be called the Inspector General Michael Horowitz building.