In what was pretty much an inevitablity, President Trump tweeted on Saturday morning that the long-awaited Nunes memo, released on Friday, single-handedly cleared his name in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian electoral intererence.
Unlike some of his recent tweets, this one had the feel of an authentic Trump missive, from the glaring spelling error to the oddly placed square quotes around his own name.
The memo, of course, did nothing to tarnish Mueller’s ongoing probe. Even if one buys the darkest interpretation of it that many Republicans are pushing — which largely consists of Coen Brothers–esque character Carter Page being improperly surveilled by the FBI — there is little reason to trust Devin Nunes’s interpretation of the facts, especially because Republicans refused to make a Democratic rebuttal public.
After weeks of build-up, the memo’s release was such a letdown that even some right-wing outlets were distinctly underwhelmed.
But the memo’s revelations, such as they were, were more than enough for the president’s fieriest partisans — your Sean Hannitys, your Representative Matt Gaetzes — to declare a fairly innocuous document a billion times worse than a thousand Watergates. And in the end, it may not be what was in the memo that really matters, merely that something, anything, no matter how flimsy, gives President Trump the cover he needs to cut the Russia investigation off at the knees.
