Michael Flynn's Redacted Russian Investigation Memo

Submission 9,349

Part of a series on Russiagate. [View Related Entries]

About

Michael Flynn's Redacted Russian Investigation Memo refers to a series of jokes and memes about the heavily-censored court documents regarding former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn's participation in the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States Presidential Election.

Origin

On December 4th, 2018, court filings regarding Michael Flynn's participation in several of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigations, including the ongoing look into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Mueller recommended that Flynn not serve any prison time due to the former National Security Advisor's "substantial assistance" in these investigations. The memo was heavily redacted (shown below).^[1]^[2]

Spread

That day, several journalists posted images of the redacted memo on Twitter. Writer Yashar Ali tweeted^[3] a series of images from the redacted memo. They tweeted at the start of the thread, "1. Flynn Memo is out….He participated in 19 interviews with the Special Counsel's office and other justice department attorneys[…]Mueller is recommending no prison time for Flynn given his participation." The tweet received more than 930 retweets and 2,900 likes in 24 hours (shown below, left).

Following the spread of the memo, people began parodying and mocking the amount of redactions. Twitter^[4] user @MarisaKabas posted a variation of the He's Not Your Man meme using the memo's redactions. The post received more than 4,000 retweets and 28,000 likes in 24 hours (shown below, center). Twitter^[5] user @fivefifths tweeted a photoshopped version of the Outkast album Stankonia using the redacted memo. The tweet received more than 1,300 retweets and 5,600 likes in 24 hours (shown below, right).

That day, Twitter^[6] published a Moments page about the meme. Several media outlets covered meme, including The Daily Dot, ^[7] Mashable ^[8] and more.