Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: Exoneration, confirmation, and vindication ... but not for Trump
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It seems impossible that the still-highly redacted version of the Mueller report reached the public only three days ago. It seems so much longer. Part of the reason it seems longer is that so much has been written in that brief period as everyone, includinAbbreviated Pundit Round-up: Exoneration, confirmation, and vindication ... but not for Trump
It seems impossible that the still-highly redacted version of the Mueller report reached the public only three days ago. It seems so much longer. Part of the reason it seems longer is that so much has been written in that brief period as everyone, including me, attempts to rip through 400+ pages looking for the key phrase, dropped name, or hidden angle that everyone missed. The sum total of articles written about the report is already surely many times longer than the original. Another aspect of it seeming such old news after just three days, is that we’ve been living in the spin zone for more than two weeks since William Barr produced his instant “summary” providing Donald Trump with every talking points he wanted. With Barr leaping in to make his enormously misleading assessment of the report, and every Trump-flavored source announcing that it was “time to move on” even before the first full sentence of the report was seen, the last two weeks have been long. And then, of course, there’s the fact that for over a year we liven with almost daily announcements that the report was going to drop. Any day now. Or next week. Or certainly before next month. That helped to make the arrival of the report seem late months ago — although the articles predicting the release of the report, were one of the few things that reporters got consistently wrong throughout the period of the investigation. But mostly what makes the report seem old news is that it is … mostly old news. That is, the report produced by the special counsel’s office consists in large part of details confirming reports that have circulated for months, or years. And that’s really the biggest news of the week—we were right. Christopher Steele was right. The FBI agents who suspected Trump’s campaign was reaching out to Russia were right. Reports that Michael Flynn, and Donald Trump Jr, and Jared Kushner were trying to build a “back channel” for secret communications with the Kremlin were right. Stories that the Paul Manafort shared private polling data with a Russian agent were right. The reports about Carter Page were right. The reports about George Papadopoulos were right. The stories about Donald Trump’s ongoing efforts to build a giant tower complete with personal space for Vladimir Putin and an Ivanka-branded spa were right. And every story of Trump trying to hide evidence, destroy evidence, suborn perjury, and simply end the investigation … they were all right. We were right. We were right. We were right. Now … what are we going to do about it? After we read some pundits, of course ... Read more