# Release the Memo (#ReleaseTheMemo; January–February 2018) *Release the Memo* refers to the coordinated political-and-social-media campaign of January 2018 demanding the public release of a [[House Intelligence Committee]] staff memo — written by staff of Committee Chairman Devin Nunes — that alleged FBI and Justice Department improprieties in obtaining the FISA surveillance warrants on Trump-campaign foreign-policy advisor Carter Page. The campaign culminated in the memo's actual release on February 2, 2018, over the objections of the FBI, the Department of Justice, the FBI Director ([[Christopher Wray]]), and the senior-Republican-leadership of the broader intelligence community. The event matters for the KB on two distinct registers: (1) as a *substantive political event* in the Trump-administration response to the Mueller investigation, and (2) as one of the most-thoroughly-documented contemporary cases of *Russian disinformation-operations amplifying a domestic American political-attack campaign* through coordinated bot-and-sockpuppet hashtag-pushing. The Hamilton 68 dashboard (German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy) documented #ReleaseTheMemo as the most-amplified hashtag in their monitoring of Russian-influence-network Twitter activity for the relevant period. ## The Nunes Memo content The 4-page memo (declassified February 2, 2018) alleged that the FBI and DOJ had improperly relied on the [[Steele Dossier]] — opposition research funded in part by the Clinton campaign — in their October 2016 FISA warrant application to surveil Carter Page. The memo's specific allegations included: 1. FBI failure to disclose the partisan funding sources of the Steele Dossier to the FISA court 2. Reliance on circular news-reporting (a *Yahoo News* article that was itself sourced from Christopher Steele) 3. FBI Deputy Director [[Andrew McCabe]]'s alleged statement that the warrant would not have been sought without the Steele material The responses to the memo: - **The FBI's official statement** (January 31, 2018, before release) expressed *grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo's accuracy* - **The Democratic-staff Schiff memo** (released February 24, 2018 after similar political process) contested the Nunes memo's central claims and provided substantial additional context - **The DOJ [[Inspector General]] report on the Russia investigation** (December 2019) found that the FISA-application process had material errors but did *not* substantiate the political-conspiracy framing of the Nunes memo - **Subsequent FISA-application litigation and additional declassifications** through 2019–2021 added detail without substantially-validating the Nunes memo's central political framing The political-content of the memo controversy has been substantively-investigated and substantively-rejected by the post-2018 institutional fact-finding process. The Nunes memo did not produce the regime-changing exposure of FBI / DOJ misconduct its promoters had anticipated. ## The hashtag-amplification campaign The KB-relevant analytical interest is in the *campaign infrastructure* through which the memo's release was politically-pressured. The campaign timeline: - **Mid-January 2018** — the Nunes-staff memo enters drafting; Republican House members begin internal pressure for public release - **January 18, 2018** — the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag begins coordinated promotion across Twitter - **January 19–25, 2018** — the hashtag accumulates millions of mentions; the campaign is amplified across [[Fox News]], [[Sean Hannity]], [[Tucker Carlson]], [[Sebastian Gorka]], and the broader right-wing-media infrastructure - **January 29, 2018** — the House Intelligence Committee votes (along party lines) to release the memo - **February 2, 2018** — Trump approves declassification; the memo is publicly released The Hamilton 68 dashboard documented #ReleaseTheMemo as the *most-amplified hashtag* in its Russian-influence-network Twitter monitoring for the late-January 2018 period. The amplification pattern showed the characteristic signatures of coordinated-inauthentic-behavior operations: - Massive volume of identical-or-near-identical content posted across hundreds of accounts - Posting-time-pattern concentration (concentrated in specific hours rather than distributed organically across the day) - Account-cluster correlation (the participating accounts following each other in patterns inconsistent with organic-network behavior) - Content-amplification across multiple platforms (the hashtag jumping from Twitter to [[YouTube]] to Facebook with coordinated timing) The amplification was *not solely* Russian-network activity — substantial domestic right-wing-media amplification was operating in parallel — but the Russian-network component was measurable and documented in real-time by the Hamilton 68 monitoring infrastructure. ## The broader pattern A specific KB-relevant analytical point: the #ReleaseTheMemo campaign is one of the documented cases in which *Russian state-sponsored disinformation operations amplify a domestic American political-attack campaign*. The pattern matters because: 1. **The domestic political-content was not Russian-generated** — the Nunes memo and the political-pressure-for-its-release were domestic-Republican-political-infrastructure outputs; the Russian-network role was *amplification* of pre-existing domestic content, not creation of new content 2. **The amplification was operationally effective** — the hashtag reached substantial trending-status on Twitter, contributing to the broader political-pressure environment that produced the memo's release 3. **The integration of domestic-political-infrastructure and foreign-state-disinformation operations** is the operational pattern of greater long-run concern than either component in isolation; the case study documents how the integration works in practice The broader Russian-state operation that #ReleaseTheMemo was part of was subsequently documented in the Mueller indictments and the post-Mueller institutional analysis ([[Senate Intelligence Committee]] bipartisan report, multiple academic studies). ## KB significance Release the Memo matters for the KB on several registers: 1. **It is one of the most-thoroughly-documented contemporary cases of coordinated-inauthentic-behavior amplification of domestic political content** — the Hamilton 68 real-time monitoring produced unusually-clear documentary record 2. **The case study documents the *integration* pattern** between domestic right-wing-media infrastructure and foreign-state disinformation operations; the integration is the operational pattern that subsequent counter-disinformation work has to address 3. **The substantive-content vs. amplification distinction** is one of the cleanest examples of how disinformation analysis has to separate *what is being said* from *who is amplifying it*; the Nunes memo's content was domestically-generated, while the amplification infrastructure was substantially Russian-network-affected 4. **The post-2022 environment limitations** — the Hamilton 68 monitoring infrastructure was substantially defunded in the post-2022 environment along with much of the broader counter-disinformation-research infrastructure; equivalent real-time monitoring is substantially less-available in the 2025+ political environment ## See Also - [[Devin Nunes]] — House Intelligence Committee Chairman; principal political-figure organizing the memo release - [[Donald Trump]] — declassified the memo on February 2, 2018 - [[Adam Schiff]] — House Intelligence Committee ranking Democrat; principal counter-figure - [[Carter Page]] — Trump-campaign foreign-policy advisor; subject of the underlying FISA warrant - [[Christopher Steele]] — author of the Steele Dossier; UK former-intelligence-officer - [[Mueller Investigation]] — the broader investigative context the Nunes memo was political-counter-operations against - [[Internet Research Agency]] / [[Project Lakhta]] — the Russian-state operational infrastructure documented as amplifying the hashtag - [[Bots]] / [[Sockpuppet Accounts]] — the operational infrastructure used in the amplification campaign