Trump’s Opponents Have One Assignment Now

On March 28, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

The Robert Mueller investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election embodied the hopes of many Donald Trump critics that it was possible to defeat the president by disqualifying him personally. Whatever further revelations are contained in Mueller’s full report, Attorney General William Barr’s summary last weekend has already signaled it’s unlikely to be that easy. But, on balance, that’s a good thing for the voices in both parties resisting Trump’s direction for the country: There’s a far better chance of uprooting his influence over the long run if his presidency is ended by the voters, not the courts or Congress.

Trump is such a uniquely galvanizing and polarizing figure, both in his style and his background, that it’s tempting for supporters and opponents alike to imagine that the political movement he has ignited could not exist without him. To that perspective, Trump is the political equivalent of the “one ring” in the Lord of the Rings books: eliminate him and everything he’s built will fall into oblivion, the way Sauron, his armies, and even the land of Mordor all vanished in a thunderclap after the ring was destroyed.

But if that was ever true (for Trump, not Sauron), it is clearly no longer so. Trump has demonstrated that there is a substantial audience in the evolving Republican electoral coalition for a message that combines open appeals to white racial resentments and unrelenting attacks on “elites” with an undiluted commitment to the traditional goals of economic and social conservatives—from cutting taxes and eliminating environmental regulations to opposing abortion and installing conservative justices on the Supreme Court. The appeal of that formula for significant elements of the GOP base would not disappear even if Trump were forced from office by one of the many investigations still swirling around him. Perhaps the only way other Republicans may be discouraged from following Trump’s volatile path is if voters show that it’s an electoral dead end by repudiating it in 2020.

[Read: After Mueller, the ongoing investigations surrounding Trump]

After the release of Barr’s summary of the Mueller report, such a head-on referendum on Trump’s course now seems virtually guaranteed next year. Trump still faces an array of other legal threats, from federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York (who have already effectively named him an unindicted co-conspirator in a plot to evade campaign-finance laws) to the accusations of tax evasion, insurance fraud, and sexual harassment from his pre-presidential career. And further details from the underlying Mueller report, if and when it’s finally released, seem likely to create additional complications for Trump (if for no other reason than Barr’s letter signaled Mueller has identified evidence of possible obstruction that has not yet been publicly revealed). But the summary—indicating that the investigation “did not establish” a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian agents—makes it highly unlikely that the president’s critics in both parties will obtain the satisfaction of seeing him removed from office before his term ends.

That’s especially true because senior House Democrats led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, recognizing the implausibility of winning enough Republican votes for conviction in the Senate, were already dubious about impeaching him.

An electoral rather than legal verdict on this presidency is probably a better outcome for the Trump detractors who consider him a threat to both the rule of law and the nation’s social cohesion. If Trump were compelled to leave office before 2020—either through resignation or congressional action—the majority of his supporters would almost certainly view it as an illegitimate coup by the establishment forces in both parties. And that would allow them to claim that his agenda, tone, and electoral strategy—what could be called Trumpism—had been betrayed but not defeated.

After Barr’s summary, no one will be able to claim the GOP has betrayed or abandoned Trump. Instead, the party is locking arms around him even more tightly. Although the attorney general acknowledged that the special counsel found enough evidence of obstruction of justice that he could not exonerate the president from the charge, congressional Republicans this week did not hedge in their bets or establish any distance from Trump pending the full release of the report. Instead, they uniformly declared the investigation has cleared him. Several, led by Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, immediately pivoted to demanding an investigation into how the Mueller probe itself was launched.

To longtime conservative strategist Bill Kristol, a leading Trump critic on the right, that reaction offers a chilling preview of how Trump may behave for the remainder of his first term—and in a second one, if he wins it. “For me, the last 48 hours … gives me a tiny hint into what the world will look like if Donald Trump is reelected: totally unrestrained, untrammeled, going after his enemies,” he told me on Tuesday. “It’s also distressing to see how many people are willing to just follow Trump’s lead on this.”

Just as telling as the loud Republican reaction to the Barr summary was the party’s virtual silence at the news that the Trump administration is now seeking to invalidate the entire Affordable Care Act in court. After Democrats made sweeping gains in the 2018 election—largely behind the message that Republicans were threatening voters’ access to health care—many in the GOP had hoped to put the “repeal and replace” debate behind them. But apart from Maine Senator Susan Collins, hardly any raised public objections (despite private grumbling) when the administration moved this week to overturn the entire ACA in a case brought by Republican state attorneys general. Nor did many in Congress dissent when Trump proposed to repeal the ACA in his latest budget.

[Read: President Trump still wants to repeal Obamacare]

In these ways (and others), the fusion between the party and its volatile president is steadily growing more complete. And that convergence increases the odds that the 2020 election could harden the existing divisions between what I’ve called the Democratic “coalition of transformation”—diverse, younger, white-collar, metropolitan-based—and the Republican “coalition of restoration,” centered on blue-collar, evangelical, and older whites who mostly live outside of the major urban areas.

With Trump now virtually assured to seek another term after the Barr letter, such a defining election is exactly what veteran Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg is expecting. He believes the president has presented Democrats with the opportunity to cement a majority coalition by identifying the GOP so unequivocally with opposition to demographic and cultural change and with an economic agenda tilted heavily toward the interests of the most affluent.

In 2020, Greenberg argues, the electorate could break away from Trump as decisively as it did in 2018. Last year, Democrats captured over 53 percent of the total House popular vote and benefited from several factors: big margins from minorities and young people, a sharp shift in their direction among well-educated whites, and even modest recovery among working-class whites, especially women distressed by the president’s effort to repeal the ACA. Mueller’s findings, as relayed by Barr, don’t seem likely to defuse that opposition: In a CNN poll released Wednesday, a solid 56 percent of Americans said the investigation had not conclusively exonerated Trump of collusion. An identical 56 percent majority said they are now inclined to vote against Trump for a second term.

With Trump redefining the GOP, Greenberg says, a significant portion of the party’s white-collar support could lastingly break away, like an ice sheet shearing from a glacier. “I think you are going to have a party that goes through a fracturing,” he predicts. Trump’s supporters, of course, expect the opposite: a huge turnout among his core white constituencies that allows him to win the Electoral College, even if he falls short in the popular vote again.

Where both sides might agree is that the results at the ballot box, rather than in any legal proceeding, now look to be the critical factor in determining whether Trumpism represents a short-term detour rooted in a single (and singular) individual, or a lasting force in American politics. Kristol is one of many Trump critics who acknowledges that, if the president wins a second term, his approach “is pretty embedded at least for a while” as the dominant thrust inside the Republican Party. But if he loses, Kristol says, the conservative critics who believe Trump’s direction is both morally bankrupt and electorally myopic may find a wider audience inside the GOP. A 2020 loss would not guarantee that Trump’s direction “will be reversed,” Kristol says, “but it’s at least in question.”

The GOP’s reliance on the white voters most uneasy about a changing America ensures that there will always be a substantial constituency inside the party for the backward-looking, racially divisive populism that Trump has synthesized. But there’s also a sliver of Republicans who still share the perspective of the party’s famous “autopsy” report after Barack Obama’s reelection; that analysis concluded the GOP must seek to engage with America’s growing minority population rather than try to mobilize more white support by portraying that diversity as a threat, as Trump has done. The sheer weight of demographic change could strengthen the “autopsy” position over time, especially if, through the coming years, it becomes clear that Trump’s approach has alienated too many other voters to win elections, as was the case in 2018.

Even in its truncated form, Barr’s summary of the Mueller report signals that no outside force is coming to undermine Trump’s message by disqualifying the messenger. It was probably a false hope to ever assume that some personal vulnerability on Trump’s part would marginalize his agenda. The assignment facing Democrats and Republicans alike who consider Trump’s vision a unique threat is clearer now than ever: prove at the ballot box in 2020 that a decisive majority of Americans reject it.

Opinion analysis: The justices wish Sturgeon “good hunting” in Sturgeon v. Frost

On March 28, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously yesterday in favor of Alaskan John Sturgeon, who waged a 12-year battle against the National Park Service over its ban on hovercraft in park preserves. As a result of the decision, Sturgeon can once again “rev up his hovercraft in search of moose” on the Nation River in the Yukon Charley Preserve. This is the second time this fight has come before the Supreme Court. On one hand, it involves important legal issues affecting public lands, federalism and water rights. But on the other, it is a narrow case over the special circumstances of federal lands in Alaska.

As a quick recap, Sturgeon was navigating the Nation River on his hovercraft in 2007 when Park Service officials stopped him and told him that his craft was not allowed under nationwide regulations banning hovercraft in the National Park System. Sturgeon filed a lawsuit in federal court, claiming that the nationwide ban did not apply in Alaska, given the unique language of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upheld the ban, not once but twice.

This time, the Supreme Court took certiorari on two issues:

First, does “the Nation River qualif[y] as ‘public land’ for purposes of ANILCA”? Second, “even if the [Nation] is not ‘public land,’” does the Park Service have authority to “regulate Sturgeon’s activities” on the part of the river in the Yukon-Charley?

As it turns out, the answer to both questions is “no.”

Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the court, went into detail about the unusual circumstances surrounding the admission of “Seward’s Folly” to the union in 1959, and the compromises that were forged between the United States and Alaska. ANILCA, she wrote, reflects those compromises by attempting to balance two potentially conflicting goals that reflect the century-long struggle over federal regulation of Alaska’s resources. This is no easy balance, as Kagan noted: “[I]f … you see some tension within the statute, you are not mistaken.”

First, Congress intended to advance the national interest in conserving “huge tracts of land for national parks.” At the same time, however, Congress also committed to protect Alaskans’ economic well-being and the state’s subsistence-based economy. ANILCA achieves the second goal in part by “mitigat[ing] the consequences to non-federal owners whose land wound up in those new system units.” Congress assured the state and its citizens that “their [lands] wouldn’t be treated just like” federally owned property.

In balancing these two “Janus-faced” goals, ANILCA enables the Park Service “to protect—if need be, through expansive regulation—‘the national interest in the scenic, natural, cultural and environmental values on the public lands in Alaska.’” But “public lands (and waters) was where it drew the line—or, at any rate, the legal one.”

Once again, just as it did in Sturgeon I, the Supreme Court emphasized ANILCA’s “repeated recogni[tion] that Alaska is different.” In setting the boundary lines of National Park units in Alaska, Congress followed “topographic or natural features,” rather than enclosing only federally owned lands as it had done in the lower 48 states, where federal reserves were drawn from the larger public domain. “The upshot was a vast set of so-called inholdings—more than 18 million acres of state, Native, and private land—that wound up inside Alaskan system units.”

In the rest of the country, Congress authorized the Secretary of Interior to “prescribe such regulations as [he] considers necessary or proper for the use and management of System units.” This grant of authority makes no distinction based on the ownership of the lands or waters within the system units. The general rule “is that the Park Service may regulate boating and other activities on waters within national parks—and that it has banned the use of hovercrafts there.”

ANILCA turns this authority on its head, “reflecting the simple truth that Alaska is often the exception, not the rule.”

ANILCA changed nothing for all the state, Native, and private lands (and waters) swept within the new parks’ boundaries. Those lands, of course, remain subject to all the regulatory powers they were before, exercised by the EPA, Coast Guard, and the like. But they did not become subject to new regulation by the happenstance of ending up within a national park.

In addition to ANILCA’s dual purposes, the Supreme Court’s rationale rests on two key points—statutory construction and ownership.

The starting point for the statutory analysis, Section 3103(c), is both a grant of authority to the Park Service and a limitation on that authority:

Only those lands within the boundaries of any conservation system unit which are public lands (as such term is defined in this Act) shall be deemed to be included as a portion of such unit. No lands which, before, on, or after December 2, 1980, are conveyed to the State, to any Native Corporation, or to any private party shall be subject to the regulations applicable solely to public lands within such units. If the State, a Native Corporation, or other owner desires to convey any such lands, the Secretary may acquire such lands in accordance with applicable law (including this Act), and any such lands shall become part of the unit, and be administered accordingly.

To unpack this convoluted provision, the court turned to ANILCA’s definitions of “land” and “public lands.”

The term “land,” as found in all three sentences, actually—and crucially for this case—“means lands, waters, and interests therein.” §3102(1). The term “public lands,” in the first two sentences, then means “lands” (including waters and interests therein) “the title to which is in the United States.” … “Public lands’ are therefore most but not quite all lands (and again, waters and interests) that the Federal Government owns.”

This tees up the ownership issue, which is the sole aspect of the opinion with broader implications, because the federal government holds water rights for public lands throughout the nation.

The 9th Circuit had concluded that the United States has “title” to an “interest” in the Nation River, under the federal reserved water rights doctrine, which recognizes rights to water for the primary purposes of federal reserves like Yukon Charley. According to the appeals court, the Nation River therefore is “public land,” so the Park Service could prohibit the use of hovercraft on the Nation River.

The Supreme Court flatly rejected this analysis, and found that the United States does not own the Nation River. “As the Park Service acknowledges, running waters cannot be owned—whether by a government or by a private party.” “Reserved water rights are not the type of property interests to which title can be held”; rather, water rights are “usufructuary,” meaning that they are rights to use the water, not to own it.

The court added that, even if a reserved water right were the type of “interest” included within ANILCA’s definition of “land,” such a right would not give the Park Service “plenary authority over the waterway to which it attaches.” Instead, the Park Service would have the right to a specific quantity of water as needed to “fulfill the purpose of [its land] reservation.” The Park Service would be able to regulate the “depletion or diversion” of water in the river, “but the hovercraft rule does nothing of that kind.”

The court was careful to point out that the Park Service has “multiple tools to ‘protect’ rivers in Alaskan national parks.” The Park Service, “at minimum,” could regulate activities on the public lands alongside the rivers. Other options include “cooperative agreements” with the State of Alaska to preserve the rivers. The Park Service could also urge other agencies, such as the Coast Guard and the EPA, to undertake regulatory measures to protect the rivers. The concurring opinion filed by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, also emphasized that NPS has other regulatory tools to protect park resources.

In sum, under ANILCA, even when nonpublic lands (and waters) in Alaska are geographically within a park’s boundaries, they may not be regulated as part of the park. “And that means the Park Service’s hovercraft regulation cannot apply there.” Importantly, at the end of the day, as the court explicitly stated, “If Sturgeon lived in any other State, his suit would not have a prayer of success.”

***

Past case linked to in this post:

Sturgeon v. Frost, 136 S. Ct. 1061 (2016)
Sturgeon v. Frost, 872 F.3d 927 (9th Cir. 2017)

The post Opinion analysis: The justices wish Sturgeon “good hunting” in <em>Sturgeon v. Frost</em> appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

Trump’s Green Light to Israel: First the Golan, Then the West Bank?

On March 28, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Nazareth.

When President Donald Trump moved the US embassy to occupied Jerusalem last year, effectively sabotaging any hope of establishing a viable Palestinian state, he tore up the international rulebook.

Last week, he trampled all over its remaining tattered pages. He did so, of course, via Twitter.

Referring to a large piece of territory Israel seized from Syria in 1967, Trump wrote: “After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability.”

Israel expelled 130,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights in 1967, under cover of the Six Day War, and then annexed the territory 14 years later – in violation of international law. A small population of Syrian Druze are the only survivors of that ethnic cleansing operation.

Replicating its illegal acts in the occupied Palestinian territories, Israel immediately moved Jewish settlers and businesses into the Golan.

Until now, no country had recognised Israel’s act of plunder. In 1981, UN member states, including the US, declared Israeli efforts to change the Golan’s status “null and void”.

But in recent months, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu began stepping up efforts to smash that long-standing consensus and win over the world’s only superpower to his side.

He was spurred into action when the Bashar Al Assad – aided by Russia – began to decisively reverse the territorial losses the Syrian government had suffered during the nation’s eight-year war.

The fighting dragged in a host of other actors. Israel itself used the Golan as a base from which to launch covert operations to help Assad’s opponents in southern Syria, including Islamic State fighters. Iran and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, meanwhile, tried to limit Israel’s room for manoeuvre on the Syrian leader’s behalf.

Iran’s presence close by was how Netanyahu publicly justified the need for Israel to take permanent possession of the Golan, calling it a vital buffer against Iranian efforts to “use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel”.

Before that, when Assad was losing ground to his enemies, the Israeli leader made a different case. Then, he argued that Syria was breaking apart and its president would never be in a position to reclaim the Golan.

Netanyahu’s current rationalisation is no more persuasive than the earlier one. Russia and the United Nations are already well advanced on re-establishing a demilitarised zone on the Syrian side of the separation-of-forces line. That would ensure Iran could not deploy close to the Golan Heights.

At a meeting between Netanyahu and Trump in Washington on Monday night, the president converted his tweet into an executive decree.

The timing is significant. This is another crude attempt by Trump to meddle in Israel’s election, due on April 9. It will provide Netanyahu with a massive fillip as he struggles against corruption indictments and a credible threat from a rival party, Blue and White, headed by former army generals.

Netanyahu could barely contain his glee after Trump’s tweet, reportedly calling to tell him: “You made history!”

But, in truth, this was no caprice. Israel and Washington have been heading in this direction for a while.

In Israel, there is cross-party support for keeping the Golan.

Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the US and a confidant of Netanyahu’s, formally launched a plan last year to quadruple the size of the Golan’s settler population, to 100,000, within a decade.

The US State Department offered its apparent seal of approval last month when it included the Golan Heights for the first time in the “Israel” section of its annual human rights report.

This month, Republican senator Lindsey Graham made a very public tour of the Golan in an Israeli military helicopter, alongside Netanyahu and David Friedman, Trump’s ambassador to Israel. Graham said he and fellow senator Ted Cruz would lobby the US president to change the territory’s status.

Trump, meanwhile, has made no secret of his disdain for international law. This month, his officials barred entry to the US to staff from the International Criminal Court, based in The Hague, who are investigating US war crimes in Afghanistan.

The ICC has made enemies of both Washington and Israel in its initial, and meagre, attempts to hold the two to account.

Whatever Netanyahu’s spin about the need to avert an Iranian threat, Israel has other, more concrete reasons for holding on to the Golan.

The territory is rich in water sources and provides Israel with decisive control over the Sea of Galilee, a large freshwater lake that is crucially important in a region facing ever greater water shortages.

The 1,200 square kilometres of stolen land is being aggressively exploited, from burgeoning vineyards and apple orchards to a tourism industry that, in winter, includes the snow-covered slopes of Mount Hermon.

As noted by Who Profits, an Israeli human rights organisation, in a report this month, Israeli and US companies are also setting up commercial wind farms to sell electricity.

And Israel has been quietly co-operating with US energy giant Genie to explore potentially large oil reserves under the Golan. Trump’s adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has family investments in Genie. But extracting the oil will be difficult, unless Israel can plausibly argue that it has sovereignty over the territory.

For decades the US had regularly arm-twisted Israel to enter a mix of public and back-channel peace talks with Syria. Just three years ago, Barack Obama supported a UN Security Council rebuke to Netanyahu for stating that Israel would never relinquish the Golan.

Now Trump has given a green light for Israel to hold on to it permanently.

But, whatever he says, the decision will not bring security for Israel, or regional stability. In fact, it makes a nonsense of Trump’s “deal of the century” – a long-delayed regional peace plan to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that, according to rumour, may be unveiled soon after the Israeli election.

Instead, US recognition will prove a boon for the Israeli right, which has been clamouring to annex vast areas of the West Bank and thereby drive a final nail into the coffin of the two-state solution.

Israel’s right can now plausibly argue: “If Trump has consented to our illegal seizure of the Golan, why not also our theft of the West Bank?”

Dead man rides NYC subway during morning rush…

On March 28, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Dead Man Found on F Train During Friday’s Morning Rush

Cops found a dead man on an F train in Queens during Friday’s morning rush.

Authorities responding to a 911 call shortly after 7:15 a.m. found the 31-year-old man unresponsive on a northbound train at the 169th Street station. He had no obvious signs of trauma to his body; EMS pronounced him dead at the scene.

The man’s identity has not been released. An autopsy will be conducted to determine how he died.

Man Bloodied in Sneak Squirrel Attack; Rodent Eyed in 3 More

A Florida man says his neighbor’s domesticated squirrel left him bloodied after sneak attack. WFLA’s Peter Bernard reports.

The Russia Skeptics Are Committing the Sins They Despise

On March 28, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

For two years, anti-Trump pundits breathlessly speculated about what Mueller Time, when it finally arrived, would bring—an airtight case for impeachment, perhaps? Those hopes were dashed last week when Attorney General William Barr informed Congress that the special counsel “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities” and “determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment” as to whether or not the president obstructed justice. Mueller Time thus became Mueller Madness, the New York Post’s NCAA-style bracket of the worst takes on the special counsel’s investigation, featuring #Resistance luminaries like Rachel Maddow and Alec Baldwin.

Russia skeptics are feeling smug, declaring that media coverage of Mueller’s probe was not just a debacle but perhaps even a generational failure. Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi compared it unfavorably to the media’s gullibility about Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, writing, “As a purely journalistic failure . . . WMD was a pimple compared to Russiagate.” National Review’s Rich Lowry called the coverage “abysmal and self-discrediting—obsessive and hysterical, often suggesting that the smoking gun was right around the corner, sometimes supporting its hoped-for result with erroneous, too-good-to-check reporting.”

Just as Trump and his allies are claiming the Mueller report was a “total and complete exoneration,” the Russia skeptics feel vindicated after years of being ridiculed by anti-Trumpers on Twitter. The truth has won out: The Russia story was “all a big hoax” after all. Time to take scalps!

Taibbi, Lowry, and Tracey have seen as much of the Mueller report as the rest of us, which is to say almost none of it (other than a few quotes cited by Barr). It’s premature to spike the football. Worse, the skeptics today are guilty of the very media behavior they’ve been criticizing for more than two years: the rush to celebrate the latest nugget of Russia news, to declare its significance with hyperbolic certainty. Convinced of their own righteousness, the skeptics are conflating embarrassing cable news talking heads, a handful of discredited stories, and the speculative fantasy that Trump was a Russian asset with the entire field of journalism—while leaving out a lot of relevant information that proves that the Russia story is anything but a hoax.

News organizations, driven either by a need for ratings, Cold War fear-mongering, or Trump Derangement Syndrome, latched onto the idea that, in Federalist co-founder Sean Davis’s words, “the president of the United States was a Russian asset.” This theory, as Davis notes in The Wall Street Journal, originated from the now-infamous pee tape dossier, which was “produced by a retired foreign spy whose work was funded by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.” Once that salacious document was out in the world, “no unverified rumor was too salacious and no anonymous tip was too outlandish to print.” The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, appearing on Democracy Now, was even more direct, calling the Mueller investigation “a scam and a fraud from the beginning” that spurred “the saddest media spectacle I’ve ever seen.”

Taibbi accused the media of creating a grotesque cult of personality around the special counsel and trusting too easily in a government authority figure. “Mueller knows became the cornerstone belief of nearly all reporters who covered the Russia investigation,” he wrote in Rolling Stone on Monday. “Journalists reveled in the idea of being kept out of the loop, thrilled to defer to the impenetrable steward of national secrets, the interview-proof Man of State. He was no blabbermouth Donald Trump, this Mueller! He won’t tell us a thing!”

Some of these critiques should be well taken. The Mueller investigation was hardly a scam, but it did bring out the worst in some corners of the media—an italicized distinction that the Russia skeptics refuse to make. To them, the entire coverage of the Russia story was a frothy mix of reckless speculation on a series of screw-ups, like ABC News reporter Brian Ross’s swiftly retracted claim that in 2016 Trump instructed campaign adviser Michael Flynn to contact the Russians. (Ross was swiftly suspended for four weeks for the error. He and ABC quietly parted ways seven months later.)

These skeptics leave out quite a bit, like the fact that Trump’s former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied about their contacts with Russian officials, that Mueller produced 37 indictments that have led to multiple convictions, and that the president himself told NBC’s Lester Holt that he had fired FBI Director James Comey over “this Russia thing.” As The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple wrote earlier this week, “the media pursued Trump and Russia because there was a great deal to pursue”—and because the president talked and tweeted about it constantly.

It’s worth debating the media’s priorities. Coverage of Russia surely crowded out other stories about the Trump administration, like its rampant corruption, its incoherent strategy in several Middle East conflicts, and its response to Hurricane Maria. But the story was hardly baseless, or on par with media failures in the lead-up to the Iraq war, which led to tens of thousands of deaths. The problem was that too many people, Russia skeptics and Mueller enthusiasts alike, couldn’t bother to differentiate between speculative fantasies about mysterious servers and, say, the more than 100 contacts between Trump and his associates and the Russians. Either all of it was true, or none of it was. Either the Mueller investigation would prove the president was a longtime Russian asset, or it would prove itself to be a gnarled sham.

The lack of nuance in our political discourse is hardly new, nor is the media’s urge to declare winners and losers immediately after any bit of news breaks. But the Mueller report has amplified these weaknesses. The failures of a pundit like Maddow, who devoted a truly insane amount of her show to Trump’s connections to Russia, and a few cherry-picked stories are being used as a cudgel to beat the entire media.

“No unverified rumor was too salacious and no anonymous tip was too outlandish to print. From CNN to the Times and the Post, from esteemed and experienced reporters to opinion writers and bloggers, everyone wanted a share of the Trump-treason beat,” Davis wrote, declaring that “America’s blue-chip journalists botched the entire story, from its birth during the presidential campaign to its final breath Sunday—and they never stopped congratulating themselves for it.”

The cycle of self-congratulation continues today with the Russia skeptics. It will likely continue for the next several weeks, as Congress dithers over whether to release the full Mueller report. If and when the report drops, it may contain new information that’s damning for Trump and his supporters in the media—definitive evidence of misjudgment and wrongdoing that justifies the extensive media coverage. And then today’s supposed losers will proudly take their victory laps.