SOMEBODY HAS TO KEEP THE TRUMPBOTS BUSY:

At this point, any work product from Devin Nunes concerning matters related to the Russia investigation should be taken with a healthy helping of salt. Although Nunes still chairs the House intelligence committee, he was forced to remove himself from its Russia probe after a bewildering March press conference in which he announced concern over possible incidental collection of Trump transition-team information. (Reports later showed that the White House had leaked Nunes the allegedly alarming material on "unmasking.") After months, Bloomberg's Eli Lake--originally sympathetic to Nunes's concerns--reported that National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster had found no evidence to support Nunes's allegations of wrongdoing.

Moreover, Nunes's actions don't quite look like those of a House intelligence committee chairman earnestly horrified by his discovery of serious surveillance abuses. He didn't share any of the information he allegedly unearthed with his Democratic colleagues before drafting the memo. There's no evidence that he sought to call witnesses to investigate his concerns. He just wrote a document, declared it shocking and made it available to people likely to be shocked.

So what is this shocking document? Fox News describes Nunes's new memo as addressing "abuses of FISA," including Nunes's unmasking concerns. According to the New York Times, the memo's main focus is the FBI's alleged use of the Steele dossier to obtain a FISA warrant against Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. So the document seems likely to be a reiteration of Nunes's concerns over unmasking, presented alongside some other bugbears of the Trump defense. To put it another way: We've been here before.

At this point, the feedback loop of disinformation between Trump-friendly congressional Republicans, the White House and pro-Trump media has become familiar. The cycle runs like this: Congressional Republicans voice concerns about an alleged abuse of government authority under President Obama or an instance of anti-Trump bias; one of a small group of relatively marginal media outlets writes about their theories and investigations, drawing yawns from more traditional reporters; then Fox News--usually including Sean Hannity--devotes breathless attention to the story; President Trump tweets about it; Fox and Congress respond to the president's tweets; and around and around we go.

But the substantive focus of the cycle of obfuscation and confusion looks slightly different on each turn. Think back to March 2017, when Nunes first alleged abuse of unmasking authority. The drumbeat since then hasn't focused unceasingly on unmasking. Rather, this particular news cycle has moved from unmasking to the Steele dossier, to attacks on the credibility of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team, to calls for a second special counsel to investigate Hillary Clinton, to efforts to push out FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, to Uranium One, to the allegedly inflammatory text messages between FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, to the Steele dossier, and back again. It's a roulette wheel of stories aimed at discrediting the special counsel and the FBI. Some of them are even true.

And stories often return, looking slightly different the second time around. Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee first called for a duplicate special counsel to investigate a grab bag of alleged offenses by Clinton before later tying their request to Uranium One. Likewise, Nunes appears to have looped together his concerns over unmasking with Republican discontent over the Steele dossier in this latest memo.

Trump hasn't yet tweeted about the Nunes memo (though Donald Trump Jr. has). Otherwise, the mechanics of the #ReleasetheMemo media cycle look entirely familiar. 

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