This is what I love about the presidency of Donald J. Trump – this news story: "CIA director met with DNC Hack Conspiracy Theorist at Trump's Urging." Isn't it magical how a 40-year veteran of the National Security Agency, formerly head of its World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group, a whistle-blower who exposed Agency abuses long before Edward Snowden hit puberty, can be reduced to a mere "conspiracy theorist" at a headline-writers' whim?

The media is aghast at this intrusion of a competing conspiracy theory into the "Russia-gate" debate: there's only room enough for the Official Story, which is that Russian state actors were deployed to capture the DNC/Podesta communications and hand them over to WikiLeaks. No evidence has ever been provided by the US government or its corporate contractors to make a convincing case for this scenario. Indeed, there's been lots of talk about Russian bots" somehow hypnotizing the US voting population into pushing the lever for Trump, but very little "forensic" evidence that shows a Russian handprint on the WikiLeaks materials.