Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

The president is not a crook.

That’s the six-word précis of Attorney General William P. Barr’s four-page summary of the still- to-be-paginated report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III of his 674-day investigation into Russian government efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Barr’s findings, delivered to Congress on Sunday, lanced the Russia pustule that began festering during the Trump campaign and carbuncled the first two years of his presidency.


Trump walked away victorious if bloodied from the announcement, hailing the Barr letter, in a classic bit of exaggeration, as a “complete and total exoneration” as he boarded Air Force One in Florida. But Trump had every right to revel. Mueller’s air-tight inquiry—did his team ever leak?—encouraged political speculation from Democrats and journalistic supposition on the part of reporters that Russian monkey wrenching of the election, which almost everyone now concedes happened, had succeeded in penetrating and influencing the Trump campaign. Mueller’s failure to connect Trumpworld directly to Russian skullduggery in a way that would hold up in a court of law made a shambles—for the time being, at least—of the theories formed by pols and reporters studying the issue from outside Mueller’s cone of knowledge.

Did the press blow the Trump story? That’s what journalist Matt Taibbi wrote in his newsletter the day before the release of the Barr letter, excoriating “every pundit and Democratic pol” who hyped an emerging Russia headline. He dings CNN, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, the New York Times, and others for what he considers credulous and gullible reporting, comparing their output to the faulty coverage of WMD during the Iraq War run-up. The Taibbi tirade will be cringemaking for every reporter whose extrapolations of the Russian story now place them on the wrong side of the Barr précis.

But there’s a major difference between the press coverage of the WMD story and the Russia business, one that deserves highlighting. Much of the faulty WMD coverage was contaminated by partisan liars who described non-existent weapons programs and caches in hopes of drawing the United States into a new Gulf war. And let’s not forget that credulous coverage had consequences far more dire than the roughing-up Trump has endured. But to my knowledge, no similar set of liars misled the press in a campaign to incriminate the president. The press has covered the Trump-Russia procedurally, the way it does whenever a major figure is accused of wrongdoing. In effect, reporters started putting Trump on trial the day special counsel Mueller was appointed, and as is usual in such procedural coverage, they indicated the sense of his guilt or innocence months and years before he got anywhere near his day in court. That’s the way the American press has worked for almost two centuries. When press coverage suggests conviction but the jury (or the prosecutor) exonerates, you’re welcome to diagnose a press failure but I think it’s something different.

In defense of the coverage, let’s remember that charges of collusion didn’t arise in a vacuum. Thanks to Mueller, we now know about the steady and suspicious dalliances with Russians during the campaign by the easily compromised, ethically challenged, political amateurs inside Trumpworld—George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. (and Michael Flynn after the campaign). Recall how many documented lies Mueller has caught the president’s men telling. Recall again the relationship between Manafort and his business associate Konstantin V. Kilimnik, believed by Mueller to be allied with Russian intelligence. The Russians weren’t just SoulCycling in their many encounters with the president’s men; they were peddling dirt or an agenda distinctly favorable to the Kremlin. Just because Mueller’s report concluded that the president didn’t commit a crime doesn’t mean there was nothing going on. We still don’t know why Trump was so eager to end FBI Director James Comey’s investigation of Russian influence, and so willing to take two years of political punishment for firing him. All of these questions—and more—will now be taken up by the various House committees.

So with all due respect to Donald Jr., who was quick on Sunday to turn the absence of more indictments from Mueller into an indictment of what he called “the Collusion Truthers,” I will not be “apologizing for needlessly destabilizing the country.” Quite the opposite. Investigators investigated. Reporters reported. The republic still stands.

As long as Trump is bestowing exoneration on himself today, let’s not forget to mention Mueller and his much-reviled deep-state warriors—remember all those “13 angry Democrats” tweets?—who proved they could wield the law in a fair and impartial matter. What are the chances Trump and his surrogates, who are now trumpeting the results, will apologize for calling them witch-hunters?

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Exonerate me with email to [email protected]. The only time my email alerts, my Twitter feed, and my RSS feed smelled collusion was when Mueller connected Manafort to Kilimnik and Roger Stone to the Russians.