Donald Trump’s attorney has written a letter threatening to sue the Pulitzer Committee unless it revokes the awards given to the Washington Post and the New York Times for their coverage of Trump’s secretive ties to Russia. Trump, of course, will probably never actually file this suit. If he did, he would certainly lose, because the Times and the Post in fact uncovered enormous amounts of damning evidence against Trump and did not, contra Trump, rely on the Steele dossier, the report compiled by the British spy Christopher Steele. Trump’s lawsuit threat is a publicity vehicle to advance the message he has never stopped making: that the entire Russia scandal is a “hoax,” ginned up by Democrats and the Deep State, of which he and his allies are innocent, and the crimes are all on the other side. The novel development is that the entire conservative movement apparatus is now singing from the same hymnal. National Review, which in the past has wandered from the pro-Trump line on some matters, now alleges the FBI “relied on the shoddy document to surveil an American citizen in an investigation that produced the Mueller probe and a two-year-long obsession with Trump and Russian built on a preposterous foundation.” You can find the same line in organs like Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and the Washington Examiner, not to mention the ordinary houses of Trump worship like the Federalist. The pretext for this chorus of new complaints that Trump has been treated very unfairly is new revelations about the Steele dossier. The tip sheet was always seen as unproven, even by those of us who gave it some credence. Steele himself estimated the tips were only around 70 to 90 percent accurate, and almost nobody would put the percentage anywhere near that high; many of the allegations he compiled came through interested parties or second- and thirdhand gossip. | 
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