There were obvious holes in the “unmasking” story from the start. The big two being that:

* Unmasking is routine. Last year there were about 7,700 unmasking requests, for example. Mike Morrell wrote about the practice in great detail here.

* If the Trump campaign hadn’t been having unusual—and frequent—back channel conversations with the country who was attacking our elections, there would have been nothing to unmask.

The only world in which “unmasking” could have possibly been a real scandal is in the delusional one where the Russians didn’t systematically interfere in our elections to help one candidate while that candidate and his emissaries encouraged this interference both publicly and privately

It is from this font that the conservative media and Bill Barr erected a pyramid of trumped up BS. The Durham Investigation, Obamagate, Tapping my wires, #ButSusanRice’sEmails—none of this makes sense unless you first reject the fundamental reality of Russian interference in the 2016 election.