How out in the open criminality suddenly becomes a media expose

Jon Chait points out that all the basic facts about Donald Trump’s attempt to use U.S. taxpayer money to bribe and extort Ukraine into smearing Joe Biden have been public knowledge for months.

This is all reminiscent of how the worst #metoo scandals — including but not limited to Cosby, Epstein, and Weinstein — all involved conduct that could barely even be called an open secret, since there was really nothing secret about it. Yet somehow no public scandal engulfed the perpetrators until some triggering event changed the media environment.