The Justice Department is “investigating former President Donald Trump’s actions leading up to the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol as part of its criminal probe of efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, an administration official familiar with the investigation said. That does not mean the department has opened a criminal investigation of Trump, however, the official said,” NBC News reports.

We copied that verbatim from the NBC article to parse it out, as on Tuesday some folks had speculated the sources for the Washington Post and New York Times reports on Trump’s actions being under investigation had to be Mike Pence’s guys Marc Short and Greg Jacob as they had testified to the grand jury looking into the failed coup attempt, but now we have good reporting coming from the government itself. The “administration official familiar with the investigation” source is purposely vague but it’s obviously not coming from the White House or NASA. The person is with the DOJ itself and almost certainly insisted on that specific wording.

The qualifier that says “That does not mean the department has opened a criminal investigation of Trump,” is meaningless because if they haven’t actually done it then the article probably would have said “The department has not yet opened a criminal investigation into Trump.” It’s an overabundance of caution, which is fine and probably necessary after years of bottomless fucking hype over the Mueller investigation went nowhere. No shame in admitting we bought into it then.

No shame in possibly jumping the gun with our headline “Justice Department criminally investigating Trump over Jan 6th” on our first reporting on this either. Yeah, “journalistic ethics” and all that shit. But set that aside and point out how it was the wrong conclusion to make based on the facts currently in front of us here between these three MSM reports on the DOJ and Trump.