Bad News for President Trump

One feature of the truth is that it doesn’t change much. A lie is hard to sustain. The details may change in each retelling because the liar is not actually remembering the events, but instead remembering the telling of the events. The truth, by contrast, is sticky. Consistency is not the only hallmark of truth—some people’s memories are better than other people’s memories, to be sure—but there’s a reason that inconsistency tends to discredit a witness.

If someone had told you a year ago, when news first broke that James Comey had made memos of his conversations with President Trump, that those memos would eventually come out and make little news, you probably wouldn’t have believed it. These memos are, after all, a big deal. They will play a major role in corroborating Comey’s story in the investigative setting.

But from a news perspective, they turn out to be a bit of a snooze, far more interesting for the fact of their release than for any new information they contain. Sure, there are modest bits of new information in them—that Reince Priebus asked Comey whether there was a FISA order on then-National-Security Adviser Michael Flynn, for example. But the broader theme is that they add