Carter Page at a presentation in Moscow, Russia, in 2016. (Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters)

Remember when Carter Page was supposed to be a spy, when he was a hot cable-TV get, when he was going to be at the center of Trump-Russia collusion? I expected to learn at least something significant new about him in the Mueller report, but it speaks to what a fizzle the report is on the central question it was supposed to be cataloguing, Trump-Russia collusion, that there was nothing new there. Or on much else. We learned a little more about how Manafort wanted to cash in on his Trump gig, but merely for his selfish purposes. Otherwise, it was the same bit players adding up to nothing much and the same Trump Tower meeting that also came to nothing. It’d be nice if all the people who were obsessed with Russia and always suggested the worst acknowledged how wrong they were, but instead it’s on to obstruction!


The Mueller investigation, like a lot of these special-counsel probes, ended up being about itself. Trump often reacted appallingly, but that’s not a crime (not even Mueller ventures to say that it is in his strange, Scottish-verdict-like bottom line of not guilty but not exonerated). In the end, Mueller has written a report for Congress to use in a potential impeachment inquiry, which I still maintain should not be the role of inferior officers in the executive branch.