House Republicans, especially those predisposed to exonerate Trump of anything Russia-related, have used every superlative in the book to describe the explosive memo.
Iowa’s Steve King said it was “worse than Watergate.”
Freshman Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, who has already called for the firing of Mueller, is of the mind that “there are people who will go to jail” over the contents of the memo.
Mark Meadows of North Carolina said in an impassioned floor speech last week that he was “shocked to read” the contents of the memo.
“I would think that it would never happen in a country that loves freedom,” he lamented, as he joined calls for the memo’s release.
Over the weekend, Gaetz told Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro — a Trump favorite who has earlier called for a “cleansing” at the Justice Department and the FBI — that disclosure of the classified House memo “will shock the conscience of the country”
The right-wing-propaganda complex immediately went to work — aided, hilariously, by an army of Russian bots that made sure the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo remained a trending topic on social media.
Before long, Donald Trump Jr. became a leading advocate for the memo’s release, and WikiLeaks soon after jumped in on the action, promising up to $1 million in cryptocurrency to whoever had the courage to leak the document.
On Tuesday — almost predictably — Alex Jones announced on Twitter that he had come into possession of a copy of the Nunes memo.
But, also predictably, it turned out that all he had was a court order that has been publicly available for several months.
Steele’s specter is really the only reason Nunes’s latest move is playing so well in conservative circles, which are likely to scream even louder if a set of talking points conveniently handpicked by Nunes sees the light of day.
Any mention of Steele’s work or his dossier sends the Infowars set into a blinding rage — no matter how much of it may have already been independently corroborated by law enforcement or intelligence services.
The dossier’s more salacious parts may remain unverified, but by now there should be no doubt that the FBI suspected there were links between Russia and the Trump campaign several months before Steele shared his investigative work with U.S. authorities.
[......]
There’s no indication Nunes is committed to releasing all of the pertinent information behind the warrant, and releasing just the bits and pieces he likes would only tell a part of the story — the one he wants the public to believe.
The potential for disinformation explains why the FBI, which almost never comments on political controversies, has asked to see the memo to implement corrective measures if needed.
They’ve only gotten crickets.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... ained.html