Howdy, welcome to your Thursday FOIAball.
By the time you are reading this (I assume tomorrow morning), my episode of Phantom Island with Steven Godfrey should be up! You can find it wherever podcasts exist. They’re everywhere now. Shouldn’t be too hard. Spotify. Try that.
Let’s dive in.
Last Thursday, the Cleveland Browns played the Pittsburgh Steelers on Thursday Night Football, only on Amazon Prime.
The game marked the first time in three years that Deshaun Watson started a nationally televised game. Having won two in a row heading into the matchup, the Browns QB was ripe for a pre-game featurette.
Introducing the segment, Amazon’s sideline reporter Taylor Rooks described Watson as though he were a grizzled cowpoke riding back into his hometown at the start of a Spaghetti Western, saying he arrived in Cleveland with a “past that was unresolved.”
Rooks let Watson speak obliquely about this mysterious incident, which he painted as a nebulous, but existential, struggle.
“I was dealing with a lot; I was dealing with the world kind of flipping against me,” Watson said. “And it was hard, honestly.”
Watson, though, seems to have come to terms with what, I’m assuming here, were the negative responses to his defense of Alison Roman’s 2020 interview in The New Consumer.
“You know, life isn't fair, and I understand,” he said.
Yesterday, another figure with murky priors re-entered the news cycle. “As Race Tightens,” the New York Times wrote of a heated congressional battle, “Republicans Resume Tepid Support for Max Miller in Ohio.”
The story detailed a previously unknown, behind-the-scenes push for Miller that came straight from the White House. As his own “unresolved past” exploded on the national stage, Trump aides reportedly “advised Republicans who had demanded Mr. Miller’s resignation to quiet down and let him try to win.”
With the election just a few weeks away, the Times said that “their warnings have largely been heeded, forcing many Republicans to walk an awkward line between helping Mr. Miller win and staying away from his embattled campaign.”
What do these two things have to do with one another? Well, aside from them both featuring (supposedly) abusive men who seem to have faced no consequences for their egregious actions because people in positions of power are eager to look away for their own benefit, there’s one guy that connects them.
Wanna know who? We’ve got the never-before-published receipts.
Max Miller via Tom Williams / Contributor / Getty; Deshaun Watson via Michael Owens / Contributor / Getty
