About a half a week ago, John Powerline was claiming this was the “smoking gun”. And about eight days ago, Scott Johnson was crowing that it all would bury Biden — and the DNC… even suggesting it proved the QAnon nuts were right about Hunter’s “laptop”. It does… not one of those things. Not even close. In fact, what’s been adduced thus far does the opposite: it implicates Tangerine more directly — in sedition (as most sober observers now agree).

So, suddenly, and in a 90 degree pivot, the boys are saying… “well, there’s too much volume here to sort through… so for now we will just say… Musk must be right — it smells bad.”

Quite a soft-pedal. That’s because if this all shows anything, it shows that Tangerine — as Individual No. 1 — created all the fires that led to the January 6 ran-sacking of the Capitol. It proves he was the “Inciter in Chief” — without a doubt. But Musk’s hand-picked “small j” journalists won’t do anything even as simple as lay these tweets out, in a time line — one that intersperses know public evidence about 1/6/21… into the context of the tweets. But EW has — in exceedingly helpful fashion, over the last few days.

To understand just how UN-important Musk’s insinuations about his own curated disclosures actually are, one only need read EmptyWheel — top to bottom. She’s got him (and Tangerine!) dead to rights: Musk is indeed “presiding over a crime scene“, as he so memorably puts it — just not the one he imagines:

…One distinct possibility that Matty apparently didn’t even consider is that, in the wake of the coup attempt, Roth had meetings with law enforcement, including the FBI, that were qualitatively different from those that went before because… well, because Twitter had become a crime scene! Consider the possibility, for example, that FBI would need to know how Trump’s tweets were disseminated, including among already arrested violent attackers. It was evident from very early in the investigation, for example, that Trump’s December 19 Tweet led directly to people planning, among militia members and totally random people on the Internet, to arm themselves and travel to DC. Or consider the report in the podcast, Finding Q, that only after January 6 did the FBI investigate certain aspects of QAnon that probably could have been investigated earlier: Twitter data on that particular conspiracy would likely be of interest in such an investigation. Consider the known details about how convicted seditionists used Trump’s tweets in the wake of the failed coup attempt in discussions of planning a far more violent follow-up attack.

Matty, for one, simply doesn’t consider whether Elmo’s observation explains all of this: that Twitter had become a crime scene, that the FBI would treat it differently as Twitter became a key piece of evidence in investigations of over 1,200 people.

None of this shows the “collusion” with the Deep State that Matty is looking for. Thus far, it shows the opposite….

Precisely.

Damn, she’s good.

And damn — Hinderaker is… senile, or dissembling.