EXCLUSIVE. Source: Twitter Pins #ReleaseTheMemo on Republicans, Not Russia

EXCLUSIVE

IT’S COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE

Source: Twitter Pins #ReleaseTheMemo on Republicans, Not Russia

Despite claims the Kremlin is driving a campaign to disclose an anti-FBI memo, a source says an early in-house analysis concludes the hashtag has been mostly pushed by Americans.

BEN COLLINS
SPENCER ACKERMAN

01.23.18 5:10 PM ET

The online groundswell urging the release of House Republicans’ attacks on the Federal Bureau of Investigation appears thus far to be organically American—not Russian propaganda, a source familiar with Twitter’s internal analysis told The Daily Beast.

#ReleaseTheMemo has been trending widely since late last week. It urges the House intelligence committee to release what its Republican authors claim is a finding of widespread FBI misconduct aimed at surveilling and discrediting Donald Trump. Democrats in Congress counter-accuse the Republicans of cobbling together a deceptive memo aimed at discrediting the FBI and Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump team over Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

On Tuesday, two Democratic leaders urged Facebook and Twitter to conduct an “in-depth forensic examination” of #ReleaseTheMemo to determine the extent of Russian propaganda promoting the hashtag. They relied on a report from the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy claiming that #ReleaseTheMemo was had become the favorite hashtag of Russian-sponsored Twitter accounts. (The report did not make any judgements about such activity on Facebook.)

“If these reports are accurate, we are witnessing an ongoing attack by the Russian government through Kremlin-linked social media actors directly acting to intervene and influence our democratic process,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam Schiff, two California Democrats, wrote to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

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