The American public definitely deserves an apology from the cable news outlets that pushed the “Russiagate story”…MSNBC, CNN, some of the print outlets etc pushed that story HARD, especially during 2017/2018, because they knew it was like catnip for their lib audience. People like to bash Fox but all the cable news do the same crap, spoonfeed simplistic and reassuring narratives to their audience. If the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016 was merely the result of some “outside” presence, then that doesn’t really require any serious reflection does it? The negative outcomes can be merely consigned to a shadowy, vague world of covert action, intelligence/counter-intelligence etc…the equivalent on the right is QAnon.
But I don’t expect any kind of reckoning, much less an apology from them, which is very unfortunate. They blue-balled their audience for YEARS and gave them jackshit at the end of it. If a foreign tourist who had no knowledge of American politics or culture visited the USA during 2017/2018 and only watched MSNBC for news, they could be forgiven for thinking that Russiagate was the biggest political issue in the country at that time.
I also don’t think that, with the benefit of hindsight that we now have after Trumps presidency, the idea that the period 2016-2020 was especially favorable to Russia regarding foreign policy, esp. re: NATO on the European frontier. At best a mixed bag I’d say, definitely not the outcome one would expect if Trump were simply Russia’s bitch
