A roundup of embarrassing commentary: The Russia-Obsessed Media Does Its Best to Ignore Clinesmith’s Guilty Plea https://www.nationalreview.com/news/the-russia-obsessed-media-does-its-best-to-ignore-clinesmiths-guilty-plea/

It really should not be that hard to simultaneously believe three things about "Russiagate":

One, the 2016 Trump campaign's sycophantic favor-seeking from Putin, a good deal of it in public view, was appalling. It is not a "hoax" to take serious issue with that.

Two, the baroque theories of collusion were nonsense, many of them obvious nonsense. It was necessary to investigate for intelligence & public confidence purposes, but the investigation should have been conducted w/more public realism from the outset about the loopier theories.

Three, some of the things done in the process of the Russia investigation should alarm us & make us rethink the structural problems with using counterintelligence tools to conduct investigations of American electoral figures with minimal public supervision.

In other words, we can & should take seriously to this day the threat of Russian election interference & the genuine political scandal of Trump's approach to it in 2016, but also take seriously how badly the efforts to 'get' Trump over speculative 'collusion' ran off the rails.

The fact that a law enforcement officer just pled guilty to falsifying information used to justify investigative steps taken against a member of the Trump campaign? That's big news. It should be big news. You don't have to whitewash Trump or Putin to see & say it is big news.