THEY OWE HIM FOR LEAKING TO THEM:

Republican lawmakers are pushing for the House Intelligence Committee to release a memo written by the panel's chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, that outlines purported surveillance during the transition period against President-elect Donald Trump by former President Barack Obama's administration.

And Russia-linked Twitter bots have jumped on the bandwagon.

#ReleaseTheMemo is the top-trending hashtag among Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations, according to Hamilton 68, a website launched last year that says it tracks Russian propaganda in near-real time.

The frequency with which the accounts have been promoting the hashtag has spiked by 233,000% over the past 48 hours, according to the site. The accounts' references to the "memo," meanwhile, have increased by 68,000%.

The most-shared domain among the accounts has been WikiLeaks, and the most-shared URL has been a link to WikiLeaks' "submit" page.

Given the significance of this issue, it is absolutely true that the memo should be declassified and released to the public -- and not just the memo itself. The House Intelligence Committee generally and Nunes specifically have a history of making unreliable and untrue claims (its report about Edward Snowden was full of falsehoods, as Bart Gellman amply documented, and prior claims from Nunes about "unmasking" have been discredited). Thus, mere assertions from Nunes - or anyone else - are largely worthless; Republicans should provide American citizens not merely with the memo they claim reveals pervasive criminality and abuse of power, but also with all of the evidence underlying its conclusions.

President Trump and congressional Republicans have the power, working together or separately, to immediately declassify all the relevant information. And if indeed the GOP's explosive claims are accurate - if, as HPSCI member Steve King, R.-Iowa., says, this is "worse than Watergate" -- they obviously have every incentive to get it into the public's hands as soon as possible. Indeed, one could argue that they have the duty to do so.

On the other hand, if the GOP's claims are false or significantly misleading - if they are, with the deepest cynicism imaginable, simply using these crucial issues to whip up their base or discredit the Mueller investigation, or exaggerating or making claims that lack any evidentiary support, or trying to have the best of all worlds by making explosive claims about the memo but never having to prove their truth -- then they will either not release the memo or they will release it without any supporting documentation, making it impossible for Americans to judge its accuracy for themselves. [...]

The good news is there are at least four easy ways for congressional Republicans and/or President Trump to definitively prove that all the right's darkest suspicions about the Obama administration are true. If this memo and the underlying documents prove even a fraction of what GOP politicians and media figures are claiming about them, then what could possibly justify its ongoing concealment?

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