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!

I’m collecting admissions of pundit wrongdoing and error regarding Trump/Russia. Just today, I have elicited two such admissions (to their credit). Much as I think there will be zero accountability, finding exceptions is good. So please send me any others you may come across — Michael Tracey (@mtracey) March 26, 2019

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.”

