WWTBAM Bored

We may someday need a press we can trust. But I hope not, because we certainly don’t have one. The drummed up narrative of collusion has now imploded.

Actually, it was always a crock, dreamed up immediately after Hillary Clinton’s election-night defeat by her staff to explain away failure. As reported in the campaign book "Shattered," by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Clinton refused to take responsibility for her defeat, and the day after her concession, top officials gathered “to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up.… Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument."

The irony, of course, is that while purporting to worry about Russian interference in American politics, by advancing this story the press was actually doing the work of President Vladimir Putin, sowing division and confusion through the American polity.

As former Clinton pollster Mark Penn tweeted, we wasted two years, at least $30 million and a lot of institutional credibility at the FBI and Department of Justice over “a false story of Russia collusion based on oppo research that was always unsubstantiated and preposterous.”