Russian-linked Twitter accounts have ramped up activity to promote conversation regarding House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes' (R-CA) memo that allegedly reveals how President Obama surveilled Donald Trump during his 2016 campaign.
#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.
WikiLeaks said on Thursday that it would reward anyone with access to the "FISA abuse memo" who chooses to submit it to the site. The Russia-linked accounts have evidently been sharing the "submit" page to push the memo's release.
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Bret Schafer, a communications coordinator at the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy who tracks the Hamilton 68 accounts, said he "certainly can't remember" the last time the researchers had seen a topic "promoted to this level" by the Russia-linked bots and trolls.
"On a normal day, our top hashtag is typically used around 400 times in a 48-hour period by the network we track," he said in an email on Friday.
"As of right now, #ReleaseTheMemo has been used over 3,000 times (and five other related hashtags are in the top 10)," he said. "In total, they've easily shared more than 4,500 hashtags on the topic in the past two days, and our top URL is Assange's offer to pay for a copy of the memo. That certainly seems to be a sign of a coordinated effort by the bots and trolls."
Rep. Nunes had been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for much of 2017 for possibly sharing classified information after a late night run to the White House in March in search of evidence to support President Trump's claim he had been wiretapped. The committee cleared Nunes of wrongdoing in December.
Still, the Intelligence Committee chairman keeps trying to steer the House Russia investigation away from its main objective. His four-page memo is the latest distraction.
The document purportedly describes classified information Nunes obtained from the FBI and Justice Department as part of his investigation into whether the Obama administration misused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to spy on Trump and his associates during the presidential transition.
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Democrats, meanwhile, have called the Nunes memo grossly exaggerated and misleading.
"The Majority voted today on a party-line basis to grant House Members access to a profoundly misleading set of talking points drafted by Republican staff attacking the FBI and its handling of the investigation," Rep. Adam Schiff, the panel's top Democrat, said in a statement on Thursday.
"Rife with factual inaccuracies and referencing highly classified materials that most of Republican Intelligence Committee members were forced to acknowledge they had never read, this is meant only to give Republican House members a distorted view of the FBI," Schiff continued.
A source with knowledge of the memo told Business Insider that it was "a level of irresponsible stupidity that I cannot fathom," adding that it "purposefully misconstrues facts and leaves out important details."
Schiff said the document "may help carry White House water, but it is a deep disservice to our law enforcement professionals."
Full story: Russia-linked Twitter accounts are working overtime to help Devin Nunes and WikiLeaks (Business Insider)