Justice Department Watchdog Crushes Trumpworld’s Deep State Dreams

We were told Russia was a hoax, the president was persecuted by Obama, and the real traitors would be locked up. So much for all that.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

For months, President Trump and his allies have been salivating over a report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, outlining what they expected would be a tale worthy of a John le Carré novel. Taking a cue from Trump, Fox News and a constellation of right-wing media have promised us that the report would reveal the smoking guns in the deep state’s plot to destroy the president. The report, a product of Trump’s insistence that his servile Department of Justice investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, would unleash the hounds of hell on the Democrats, the Obama administration, and the intelligence community.

Well, the report has finally been released, and the results are underwhelming, to put it mildly. Burn this phrase, lifted directly from the report, into your mind: “No evidence political bias influenced the decision to open the Russia probe.”

As has happened time and again, Trump’s ludicrously overwrought promise — that this was to be a tentpole of his ongoing (and entirely imaginary) war against the deep state — was followed by an utterly underwhelming outcome.

The vast enterprise of formerly conservative media outlets now dedicated to trafficking in baroque QAnon-adjacent conspiracy theories in defense of Trump will try their best to polish this turd into a diamond. The chances are slim, however, that they’ll be able to convince even their own audience of credulous Trump rubes and conspiracy nuts that this report means all that much.

Like a fart in a hurricane, the Horowitz report will soon be lost in the roiling chaos of a Washington, D.C., in the midst of serial and parallel crises all caused by the hand of Donald Trump. The Ukraine scandal has exploded into a full-fledged emergency as witness after witness confirms Trump extorted a political hit job on his domestic rivals from a foreign power. Republican elected officials are now effectively mouthpieces of the Kremlin, repeating word for word talking points written by Vladimir Putin’s propagandists. To…