Roadkill

Breaking news from the Wall Street Journal.

• Devin Nunes, Republican House representative.
• Michael Ellis, White House attorney.
• Ezra Cohen-Watnick, National Security Council intelligence director.
• John Eisenberg, top lawyer for the National Security Council.

At least four people thrown under the bus, and for what? A botched attempt at providing fake evidence to corroborate a sequence of unhinged morning tweets by President* Donald Trump, accusing his predecessor of criminal conduct without a shred of evidence. Such a weak and obvious attempt at deflection doesn't seem to be worth all that effort.

The accusation was baseless from the start, but the White House appears to have been poring over classified intelligence to find something, anything, that might support the President's outlandish claim. They found nothing suitable, but they decided to go ahead anyway, using some largely inconsequential documents and trying to confuse and dazzle Devin Nunes enough to believe it was relevant. After squirming a bit in response to questions, he said that the surveillance he had seen was probably legal, seemingly incidental, and possibly only referencing people in the Trump campaign rather than involving any of them directly. Even Nunes says that there is still no evidence to support the President's accusations.

The Trump administration is trying very hard to suppress the Russia story, and they don't seem to hesitate to destroy the career and reputation of their pawns in the process. Their problem is that the cover-up is very badly planned, far too obvious and even incriminating in itself. They should have learned from history how a cover-up tends to be a very bad idea for a president.