I've long thought that one of the many mistakes Richard Nixon made during the Watergate mess was this: He had supporters who for their own reasons, including but not limited to stubbornness and raw emotional response, wanted to continue to support him. But he failed to supply them with sufficient rebuttal information for when their friends said, "Well, it looks like your boy Nixon is guilty." The guy was guilty but he could have given his fans something — anything! — to say when they were put on the spot to defend their fealty to him. I had one Nixon-loving friend who could only mutter, "Well, I'm sure in the end he'll explain it all in a way that makes sense and vindicates him." He said that over and over for months until even he couldn't believe it any longer.
Want another example of much the same thing? One of the reasons so many people came to believe that O.J. Simpson was guilty-as-hell for that double murder was that his fans had no answer for the question, "Well, if he didn't do it, who did?" It's possible of course that an accused party could be innocent but we simply don't have an alternative scenario…but that doesn't fly so well in The Court of Public Opinion. Simpson loyalists could only fumble out an incomplete theory that the murders had been committed by Colombian Drug Lords even though there was zero evidence any Colombian Drug Lords had been within a thousand miles of the murder scene.
This memo that's been released — the one Trump says "completely vindicates" him even though it does no such thing is an attempt to give his supporters something to say. Last night on Bill Maher's show, David Frum said its main purpose was to give Sean Hannity a piece of paper to wave on camera saying there's proof of a conspiracy to railroad Trump. Those who want to believe will believe that. They now have something to say at parties. A secret memo said so, never mind who wrote it or what it says. It's a secret memo. Secret memos are never wrong except when we don't want to believe what they say.
To read a copy of the memo that's been annotated to explain everything, go here. To read an overview of the whole thing, go here.