The Scams Are Winning

American language suggests that grift can be separated from everything else. American life suggests otherwise.

Any scam that manages to succeed as a scam, if you squint a little when looking at it, will also look pretty similar to … competence. Photo: HBO

By Megan Garber

Late last month — shortly after the special counsel’s office delivered the results of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian collusion in the 2016 election to the Justice Department (and shortly after Attorney General William Barr sent his four-page summary of the years-in-the-making report to Congress, and shortly after President Donald Trump summed up the summary by declaringthat report amounted to a “Total EXONERATION”) — the University of Southern California law professor Orin Kerr posted a tweet. “Imagine if,” Kerr wrote, “the Starr Report had been provided only to President Clinton’s Attorney General, Janet Reno, who then read it privately and published a 4-page letter based on her private reading stating her conclusion that President Clinton committed no crimes.”

Kerr’s framing of the situation struck a nerve: The tweet was liked more than 69,000 times, and retweeted more than 22,000 times. (One of the retweeters was Monica Lewinsky, who added her own perspective to Kerr’s imagining: “if. fucking. only,” she responded.) Imagine if, it turned out, captured something about a report that continues to hover in a purgatorial place. The thing is done…