The New Water-gate

Now we have a sense of the real reason behind The Former Guy's moronic babbling about water pressure, about the need to flush a toilet 15 or 20 times, instead of once. It was those stubborn documents that he was trying to flush down the White House toilet. They clogged the toilet so comprehensively that it needed an engineer to unclog it. Call it Water-gate.

But wait. There's more. TFG's handling of classified documents was so haphazard that the boxes and boxes of documents that he took from the White House to Mar-a-Lago contained top secret documents. As an intelligence officer in Korea, I was responsible for about 1,500 classified documents. Somehow, we once lost one page of one minor document, and we had to go through all kinds of administrative hoops. This makes me wonder if TFG will pay any price at all for cavalierly taking top secret documents out of the White House. His cult—you know, the people who would still vote for him even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue—won't care. And you have to wonder if the prosecutors or the media will hold him accountable.

In her latest Letters from an American, Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson pointed to a 2017 Columbia Journalism Review study of the coverage of Hillary Clinton's emails. Remember them? Professor Cox Richardson wrote that the study by Duncan J. Watts and David M. Rothschild found that "the New York Times in six days published as many cover stories about Clinton’s emails as they did about 'all the policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.' The network news gave more time to Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined."

Let's see if the Times and others beat the drum as loudly and incessantly about TFG's handling of classified documents—in the White House bathroom and at Mar-a-Lago—as they did about Hillary's emails.