That’s Yuval Levin’s name for the period the press, the partisans and the public have occupied since Sunday, when Attorney General William Barr wrote a four-page letter to notify Congress that, after somewhat less than 48 hours spent reviewing the work product of special counsel Robert Mueller and his team’s nearly two-year probe of Russia’s attack on the 2016 election and any role that might have been played therein by Donald Trump or his campaign, he was confident no prosecutable obstruction of justice or collusion had been unearthed.

Writing in the conservative National Review on Monday, Levin recites his claim to mastery of the matter: Upon the release of the Starr report that presaged the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, Levin staffed Newt Gingrich. That junior post afforded him a firsthand vantage as, in small groups, members of Congress read the report. “It was reasonably clear,” he writes, “that the shock on their faces when they left that room was not a function of reading the executive summary.”

From the MarketWatch archives (Sept. 11, 1998):Starr details Clinton’s ‘strategy of deceit’

What history, again this time, will recall, per Levin (who says he never believed the Trump team had been involved in collusion with Russia, at least in part because “[n]o one who witnessed any part of the bumbling buffoonery of the Trump campaign could quite believe these people could be involved in an international conspiracy”), is the Mueller report itself, in all its particulars, and not the Barr summary of the Mueller report’s chief conclusions, including the fact that the report quashes Trump’s long-running resistance to the very idea that Russia interfered at all.

From another perspective, USC law professor Orin Kerr also looked back this week on the Starr report, overlaying for comparison’s sake some of its protagonists on our current historical phase — that is, in Levin’s coinage, the Barr Letter Interlude:

To which another of that episode’s key figures, Monica Lewinsky, responded: “if. fucking. only.”

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