Russiagaters Beat a Retreat

A coworker poked her head into my office Friday afternoon and announced, "Mueller has delivered his report."  A few hours later, at the entrance to my apartment building, I ran into a neighbor, a bitter transsexual, who seemed to be in an unusually good mood, confident that once the contents of Mueller's report are revealed, Trump will be exposed as Putin's plaything.

What are all these liberal Democrats going to do now that Mueller has finished his Russia investigation without charging Trump?

Clearly the expectation was that Trump would be charged with accepting cash from the Kremlin or somehow facilitating the purported hack of the Democratic National Committee or the pilfering of John Podesta's Gmail password.

Trump's collusion with Putin has been an article of faith among card-carrying Democrats, and a mainstay of the mainstream media, for more than two years. Now what?

The walk-back is not going to be a walk-back but a double-time retreat. As Matt Taibbi writes,
"It’s Official – Russiagate is This Generation’s WMD."

The perspective of a proponent of Russiagate is just as illuminating. In "Three Takeaways From the Barr Report"  David Leonhardt utters the unthinkable:

I’m obviously not a fan of the president. And I think it’s important for all of Trump’s critics to accept the possibility — the likelihood, at this point — that his campaign did not work together with Russia in a meaningful way.

Yes, the Trump campaign seemed shockingly and unpatriotically open to doing so. But that’s not the same as following through. Progressives shouldn’t go down the Fox News road and start adopting their own factually weak or outright false conspiracy theories, like those involving Barack Obama’s birthplace, voter fraud, Uranium One, George Soros, Solyndra and on and on.

But that is exactly what Russiagate has been for the last two-plus years. There wasn't a vast conspiracy by a foreign power to elect Trump because no one, Trump himself, thought Trump was going to win.

Russiagate was a smokescreen to obscure the fact that the "greatest nation on earth" freely elected a white supremacist billionaire huckster who campaigned against the "Washington Consensus."