I wrote this 8 years ago about Wikileaks, and beyond holding up pretty well it applies to the Mueller Report — though we don’t have a Mueller suffix yet.
Cablegate has dragged on for months now and, given the rate at which WikiLeaks has been processing the documents, it could drag on for years to come. Yet at the outset it was quickly reduced to one of the few kinds of cud the mass media can chew on: the event. (The corollary: Julian Assange, the celebrity.) Much as those who rush out to see the latest movie usually announce that it’s ‘great!’, the initial round of punditry reacting to Cablegate was quick to declare that the cables were so much triviata that, at best, might flesh out some novelistic details of what we all ‘really’ knew anyway. But these rushed judgments were based on the slender evidence of a handful of cables and, of course, no sense of how the material, particular or general, might play out over time. We have no idea how ‘Cablegate’ will unfold, even less so WikiLeaks, and even less so the material it possesses (in particular its ‘insurance policy’). But consider what the ur-gate, Watergate, has become: it began as a building and has become, decades later, a suffix universally understood to denote scandal. No one ‘really’ knew that would happen.