If your curiosity about Spy Smasher, the mid-40s Republic Serial, has been piqued, well don’t just wonder. How was it that a garbage anti-Trump dossier gathered by an ex–foreign spy from shadowy Russian sources came to set so much of the media narrative about the Russia probe, and evidently have an outsize influence on the thinking and the actions of the FBI? We should try to find out as reliably as possible how much FBI and other officials were legitimately freaked out by some of the Russia connections of Trump associates, and how much they were acting in an amateurish panic and out of partisan malice. You don’t have to be a deep-state conspiracy theorist to want to know how this got started and why. But it cast a shadow over the White House, occupied an inordinate share of the nation’s political attention, and saddled innocent people with large legal bills.Īnd for what? To establish that the far-fetched theory that the Russians coordinated with the Trump campaign indeed wasn’t true, and to take a pass on pronouncing one way or the other whether President Donald Trump allegedly obstructed justice?
They enjoyed it and played it up and hoped for the very worst. Its boosters didn’t experience it as such, of course. There are plenty of goodies in this edition of Weekend Jolt, but before you heap your plate from the all-you-can-eat buffet, please do read Rich’s new column, bluntly titled “Yes, Investigate the Investigators.” From it: Yes, as Rich Lowry says in his new column, Barr used the “s-word.” Commence pearl-clutching. So many knickers are in so many twists over Attorney General William Barr’s testimony before Congress this week, in which he alleged that there might have been government spying on the Trump White House.