Before the fog of nonsense descends over the whole business again, let us stipulate that the letter from White House Counsel Emmet Flood that emerged late Thursday afternoon absolutely has no basis in law or in the Constitution. That mattered once. I seem to remember something about it. From NBC News:

"Because they do not belong to our criminal justice vocabulary, the [special counsel's office's] inverted-proof-standard and 'exoneration' statements can be understood only as political statements, issuing from persons (federal prosecutors) who in our system of government are rightly expected never to be political in the performance of their duties. The inverted burden of proof knowingly embedded in the SCO's conclusion shows that the special counsel and his staff failed in their duty to act as prosecutors and only as prosecutors."

And a lot of the rest of it is from the legal mind of Sean Hannity, wherein apparently is stored all the arrant nonsense that was no help to Richard Nixon.

"Part 'truth commission' and part law-school exam paper..."

"The pendancy of the SCO investigation clearly interfered with the president*'s ability to carry out his public responsibility to serve the American people and to govern effectively."

Would that were the case. If it were, maybe Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh would be only minor annoyances.

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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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