I think there’s a widespread misperception about the release of James Comey’s memos concerning his meetings with the president* in the immediate aftermath of the election and the inauguration. It took the Republicans in the House approximately thirty-nine minutes to leak the contents of those memos. (Maybe someone forgot where the copy paper was stored.) As soon as they became public, however, it became obvious to most people that this may well have been one of the greatest own goals in the history of American politics.

Taken in full, the memos pretty much confirm most of what Comey’s been saying in public for months now, including at the various stops along his current extended book tour. As such, they tacitly confirm a lot of what we know of the dossier prepared by Christopher Steele. And, in specific, they contain passages like the following one, which is bound to be famous in history as a kind of combination of the Smoking Gun tape from Watergate and the Reynolds Letter.

Twice the President brought up the “Golden Showers” thing and said it really bothered him if his wife had any doubt about it. He then explained, as he had at our dinner, that he hadn’t spent overnight in Russia during the Miss Universe trip. Twice during our conversation Reince (Priebus) tried to interject a comment about the [REDACTED] and “why it was even in there” but the President ignored him. The President said “the hookers thing” was nonsense, but that Putin had told him “we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world.”

Even if you’re not president* of the United States, who tells this story to the head of the FBI? Hell, who tells this story to the folks at the clubhouse bar at Mar-a-Lago? (OK. Maybe to them.) How the Republicans in the House thought this stuff would help them is beyond the capacity of most normal people to understand.

However, the release was not meant for normal people to understand. It was meant to rile up the Fox-watching, talk-radio, chain email base of Trump’s support. You see, Trump made Comey give up the memos. Winning! And in them, there is not a single recorded instance of the president* accidentally lapsing into Russian or breaking into a kazatski. NO COLLUSION! YOU’RE THE PUPPET! SO MUCH WINNING!

And then there’s this part, aimed straight at the crazy conservative monkeyhouse.

"I said something about the value of putting a head on a pike as a message," The President replied by saying it may involve putting reporters in jail. 'They spend a couple days in jail, make a new friend, and they are ready to talk. I laughed as I walked to the door Reince Priebus had opened."

See? That’s a man who tells it like it is, and throws in a funny about prison rape the way all manly men who tell it like it is do. (Oh, by the way, Mr. Comey? Shame on you for yukking it up about prison rape with a dangerous moron.) I expect to hear this passage from the memos in targeted radio spots during the 2020 campaign. To be sure, there are some signs that the Trumpkin base is cracking, but that's mostly about pork products and soybeans, not about the obvious corruption and incompetence betrayed in the Comey memos.

(There are a number of passages in which the president* demonstrates that he has no earthly idea what he's talking about. It's one of the most striking things about the memos.)

Besides, the Republican base has demonstrated almost an infinite number of times that it can be talked out of voting in its own best interest by a combination of shiny objects, magic beans, and brown people. And, of course, the Mueller still may drop a bunker-busting dung bomb on the administration* any day now. But that won’t matter either to the audiences at which the leaked Comey memos were aimed. They've all been conditioned. It’s all a libtard witch hunt. Everybody knows that.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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