This is an odd segment of Fox News coverage, or at least it would be if it hadn't been preceded in recent months by iterations of the same notion. Even if we find out that the Republican presidential campaign of 2016 did indeed actively collude with Russian intelligence operations against their opponents, asks the perpetually dignified-ish conservative Fox anchor Brit Hume, is that really a crime?
"But what crime? Can anybody identify the crime? Collusion, while it would be obviously alarming and highly inappropriate for the Trump campaign, of which there is no evidence by the way, of colluding with the Russians. It's not a crime. So are we talking about here the president's firing of Comey being and obstruction of justice? And they got a grand jury on that? Is that was this is about?"
He's parroting the same lines by Sean Hannity, as an aside, and he's also just plain wrong about multiple aspects of the story, which ought to be embarrassing for anyone so perpetually dignified-ish, but we'll ignore that. What's become just a little bit odd, as the months roll on, is just how wary even the supposedly-most-serious Republican voices are about staking themselves to any claim that the members of Trump's Republican campaign team would of course never have done such a thing.
To be sure, Hume here wants the audience to know he would consider such a thing "obviously alarming" and "highly inappropriate"—but what he's not saying is that active collusion isn't a possibility. There's no evidence, he says—but he's not discounting the possibility that some might come up. And if we were to learn that some of the circumstantial evidence suggesting obviously alarming and highly inappropriate things, a week from now or a month from now, Hume is covering that base preemptively: He'd be very disappointed to hear it, dear viewers, but he's already prepared to defend it.
Which is just a bit odd, and it's been such a commonplace refrain that perhaps we've become a bit inured to just how odd it is. From the House to the Senate to Fox News, you don't hear many (any?) voices proclaiming that it's truly insulting to think that a Republican presidential campaign and transition team, full of Republican functionaries and lawmakers and strategists, would do such a transparently malevolent thing as to collude with an unfriendly foreign power in order to throw a national American election. It should be an insulting thing to think of someone, should it not? We can all agree to disagree on the issues facing our nation, and so on and so forth, but isn't it truly outrageous to suppose that top members of one political party worked on-the-sly with a foreign power in an act that gains power for the colluders and financial gains for that power at the not-exactly-trivial expense of the nation's democracy itself?
But no, from the House to the Senate to Fox News, there are very few Republican lawmakers or pundits willing to publicly stake themselves to a claim Trump's assembled team would never have done such a thing. There are, however, many voices like Hume here who are laying the groundwork for what the movement might next pipe up with if such a thing proved true.
That seems like it should be noted, somehow. In an environment in which lawmakers and pundits alike are very, very eager to fudge the truth to benefit the party's needs, there's still precious few voices willing to stake their reputations to the theory that the Republican team now populating the White House would never have stooped to such a thing.