Allies fanned outrage

Washington: The release of the memo mattered less than #releasethememo.

After weeks of build-up, the three-and-a-half-page document about alleged FBI abuses during the 2016 presidential campaign made public on Friday was broadly greeted with criticism, including by some Republicans. They said it cherry-picked information, made false assertions and was overly focused on an obscure, low-level Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page.

It didn't live up to the hype.

But the campaign, captured in the hashtag #releasethememo, which was trending on Twitter for days, may have a far more significant impact than the memo's contents. It was a choreographed effort by House Republicans and top White

House officials to push a highly contentious theme - that the FBI and the justice department abused their powers to spy on the Trump campaign, and relied on dodgy information from a former British spy paid by Democratic operatives.

What began as an ember more than two weeks ago was fanned into a blaze by conservative media titans, presidential tweets and Republican lawmakers urging people to use social media to pressure Congress to make the memo's contents public. "I invite everybody to use the hashtag #releasethememo," Representative Raúl Labrador, the Idaho Republican, said on Fox News during the campaign's infancy, adding that Americans would be "shocked" when the memo was released.

By Friday, it was obvious that the memo had become part of a proxy fight for the larger battle that the White House is now waging to discredit the Russia investigation led by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel. By promoting the idea that the Mueller inquiry was born from a corrupt and partisan process, his entire investigation can be tarred as a biased inquisition.

Two hours after the memo's release, the White House issued a statement saying the document "raises serious concerns about the integrity of decisions made at the highest levels of the department of justice and the FBI to use the government's most intrusive surveillance tools against American citizens."

The barrage that the President and his allies have launched at the FBI is focused on one small part of the mission - surveillance warrants - in an agency of 35,000 people that investigates everything from bank robberies to human trafficking to Wall Street malfeasance. But Trump could have more ammunition in the coming weeks as the justice department's inspector general finishes a report.

New York Times News Service