Matt Yglesias is obviously right:

But the Trump apologists aren't there yet. They're proceeding in a cautious, stepwise fashion toward that ultimate goal:

President Donald Trump wouldn’t “necessarily” be in “any legal jeopardy” if he knew about the infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting, as claimed Thursday by his former personal attorney, according to The Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel.

“I think the bigger point here is, is there a crime? And it obviously was not a crime for [Donald] Trump Jr. to meet with this Russian national and find out what she had to talk about,” Strassel said on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle.”

“It’s also not a crime for [the president] to have had prior knowledge of it, either,” she told Fox News host Laura Ingraham.

“The question is, has [Trump] ever under oath said that he didn’t know? Was he in any situation where he might be viewed as having lied to federal law enforcement? I’m not really sure that’s the case,” Strassel added. “So it’s another potentially bad headline if it’s true. But I’m not necessarily sure it’s any legal jeopardy.”

So he lied about what we now know was a conspiracy by a hostile power to subvert our elections. But did he swear on a Bible before lying? That's what's important!

This echoes a talking point from earlier in the week:

President Donald Trump’s taped 2016 conversation with his then-personal attorney Michael Cohen on buying the rights to a Playboy model’s story of an alleged affair is “not illegal,” though it might be embarrassing, former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus said Tuesday during an exclusive interview on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle.”

“At the very worst, it might be embarrassing, but it’s not illegal,” Priebus (shown above) told Fox News host Laura Ingraham. “One thing I have learned from being out of the sort of spotlight and the daily grind is that when you go back to Wisconsin and Michigan and Ohio ... I have not found a single person who is swayed by any of these stories [that are] a massive financial boon to ... cable news, and especially a couple of other networks.”

The bar is so low we're going to have to send SEAL divers down to find it.

Meanwhile, FoxNews.com has decided that the most important story in America right now is this:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi described the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks as an “incident” during her weekly news conference Thursday.

The outlandish slip-up about the deadliest attack on U.S. soil came during a discussion in which Pelosi criticized the Trump administration’s stance on immigration and its claims that the Democrats have been weak on border security....

“We have a responsibility to protect our borders. All of our borders. Let’s make no mistake about that. Democrats have been strong on that point. All of our borders,” Pelosi told the reporters.

“In fact, I said to some of you before, when we had the 9/11 incident and the commission was formed — and they made their recommendations — they made recommendations to protect America, but the Republicans would never take them up. And some of it was about our borders. The Republicans would never take them up,” she added.

Even President George W. Bush called 9/11 an "incident" once:

On September the 11th, 2001, our nation was confronted by a new kind of war. See, we're at war. This is a war. This isn't a single isolated incident. We are now in the first war of the 21st century.

And then-candidate Donald Trump referred to the Pulse nightclub massacre as an "incident":

As the news gets worse, so will the rationalizations and evasions. But the Trump enablers are undoubtedly saving a few rationalizations for later.

Crossposted at No More Mr. Nice Blog