Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

One unbreakable rule of the revenge genre stipulates that at an early point in the narrative, when the hero is about to fall to the villain, all action stops. The hero, kicked to the curb bleeding, delivers a soliloquy declaring that he will track down and punish the villain, no matter how long it takes, no matter what pain must be endured, no matter how great the cost, justice will be done. The villain doesn’t need to be in attendance for the speech; it isn’t for him, it’s for the audience. The speech rises and rises until it reaches its climax. You have two choices, the hero will say. Kill me now or spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder, because I will be coming for you.

Mark Warner of Virginia, ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, gave a squishy version of the revenge speech this week at a news conference he held with committee chair Richard Burr (R-N.C). He didn’t snarl like Liam Neeson does in the Taken trilogy. He didn’t slay 84 people as Keanu Reeves did in the first John Wick movie. Nor did he expire while trying to extract payback on a shark, like Robert Shaw in Jaws. But in giving his midterm report, Warner seethed with the single-mindedness of Clint Eastwood cast in a movie about a U.S. senator.


Warner directs this controlled fury against President Donald Trump, who has taunted the committee with tweets disparaging the Russian affair as a hoax. This week, Trump zapped the committee again, demanding that it direct its attention to investigating the “fake news” media. Warner has good reason to be aggrieved. The president’s Republican supporters want every Russian inquiry, including special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, shut down as politically motivated wastes of time. But like a crusading detective being pressured by the mayor to wrap things up before the election, he’s resisting.

“This feels like it’s taking a long time. It is taking a long time,” Warner said at the news conference. “But getting it right and getting all the facts is what we owe the American people.”

Burr held that note, telling the pressies that he would not realize his previously stated hope of concluding the investigation this year, and would not predict an end date.

The senators conceded that their investigation—which has gathered almost 100,000 pages of documents and conducted more than 100 interviews—has yet to bag any quarry. “The issue of collusion is still open,” Burr said, by which he meant “not proven.” This was an odd comment for Burr to make. Russians dangled information in front of Donald Trump Jr. in June 2016 that “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” according to the email to Junior that set up the meeting. “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Sure seems like collusion happened. What’s left to be resolved is how much of it went down, where and when. At least that’s what Senator “Dirty Harry” Callahan would say.

The real senators did, however, put another coat of varnish on findings of the intelligence community that Vladimir Putin’s people sent a torrent of propaganda through social accounts and hacked systems with the recklessness of teenagers during the 2016 campaign. Russia peppered Wisconsin and Michigan with Facebook ads just before the election. Was it just a coincidence that campaign director Paul Manafort sent a memo urging Trump to focus on those two states? And the Russians are still mucking around in our politics, the senators said, indicating that the revenge cycle will take several more turns before it ends. If it ever ends.

“Normally the way these things wrap up is you start running out of new information. That’s not the case,” said committee member Senator Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.). “We’re months and months into this, and we keep finding plenty of more stuff to look into.”

The intelligence committee hinted, however, that it had given up on unraveling the Steele Dossier, the smutty oppo-report about Donald Trump written by former British spy Christopher Steele and which Trump calls “totally made up” by a “failed spy.” We have “hit a wall,” Burr said—Steele won’t talk to the committee. Not knowing who paid for the dossier and clueless about the identity of the dossier’s sources, the committee has been unable to judge the document’s credibility. Lucky for the investigation, Action Hero Mueller has intervened to interview Steele, taking over the FBI inquiry into the dossier. As action heroes go, Mueller hews more to the Charles Bronson type, remaining silent for reel after reel. You recall that Mueller met behind closed doors with the committee in June to discuss “deconfliction,” the art of sharing information without interfering with one another. (On Friday, Mueller met with the chief judge of the D.C. federal court and other attorneys. This unusual meeting could be big, writes former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti, if it pertains to “a leak or a security issue regarding a grand juror,” or it could be something more pedestrian, like a defense counsel challenging a subpoena.)

The Trump gang’s struggles with communications hygiene continued. Chief of staff John Kelly’s personal mobile phone came down with some mysterious malady, and the White House IT office concluded that the device had been hacked, maybe as early as December. The White House claims that he hasn’t used the phone since joining the administration in its opening hours. That doesn’t jibe with his months-long observation that the phone wasn’t working properly. If he wasn’t using it, how did he discover it wasn’t working?

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, whom soon to be ex-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson calls “the royal family“ behind their backs, got busted for having a third, and previously unreported, email account on their private domain. Hundreds of emails from the White House were sent to the account, which they share. (Politico had previously reported that Jared and Ivanka had used personal emails to conduct some government business.) The president, previously vocal about wanting to jail officials who use private email, has been silent on this issue.

Thanks to his shouting and warmongering, Trump has made it easy to frame him as the villain, so let’s do it. Having minted his brand in gold—everything from sink fixtures to seat-belt buckles to Oval Office curtains woven an auric yellow—Trump will be this feature’s Mr. Gold(short)finger. Preening, cruel and more than a little cocky. Too cocky. Compare him with Mueller, a living, walking Gary Cooper who doesn’t leak, doesn’t talk to the press, and has successfully sworn his posse to secrecy. Nearly invisible, he and his agents lurk everywhere, girding for the climactic struggle. No matter whether the run time on this movie is measured in months rather than minutes, you kind of know how it’s going to turn out, don’t you?

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Had Charles Bronson challenged Clint Eastwood to a fistfight when both men were in their prime, who would have won? Let me know at [email protected]. My email alerts plan on being the next James Bond, my Twitter feed thinks of itself as the Anglo Jackie Chan, and my RSS feed takes pride in being an action coward.

