REALITY IS A HARSH TASKMASTER:

In the years since Donald Trump's election, the former president's supporters and opponents have often seemed to occupy entirely separate factual universes regarding both his conduct and the investigations of it. 

In the factual universe occupied by Trump's opponents, the former president serially engaged in the grossest of misbehavior, he was rightly subject to repeated investigations as a result, and he took aggressive and inappropriate actions to frustrate these investigations--leading to further investigative interactions.

Conversely, in the factual universe occupied by the former president's supporters, a conspiracy to defame and discredit Trump--led by the Hillary Clinton campaign and including the campaign's lawyers and investigators, the media and the FBI--developed during the 2016 campaign. The investigations of Trump during the campaign and subsequent to it were based not on any good faith belief, let alone any reality, that he or the people around him had done anything wrong. They were, rather, a "hoax"--a deliberate attempt to defraud the public.  

These two competing worldviews have long existed on parallel planes. They show up at the same congressional hearings and compete for airtime. Viewers can switch between them with a click of a remote control. But they almost never actually confront one another. 

Until, that is, the trial of a lawyer named Michael Sussmann, who was acquitted Monday morning by a federal jury in Washington DC. The Sussmann trial presented the closest thing we have seen to a simple showdown between these two worldviews. 

On the one side was Special Counsel John Durham, appointed by former Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate wrongdoing in the Russia investigation, peddling a semi-respectable version of the Trumpist theory of the case. 

On the other side was a lawyer facing a single charge of lying to the FBI, who argued at trial that he had tried to give the FBI a heads up about a weird new line of possible connection between Trump and Russia before it broke in the press. 

The trial, concerning this sole alleged false statement at a single brief meeting, took two whole weeks to present to the jury. 

It took that jury just six hours to reach a unanimous verdict of acquittal.   [...]

As the jury forewoman put it to NPR in the trial's wake, "I feel like we could have spent our time more wisely." 

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