Lauren Boebert Is Next

Four years of file. Two courtrooms next month. Buckle up.

Chuck Edwards is out.

Tuesday we published his texts and told him to resign. Wednesday, 5 a.m., he quit his campaign. And no, I don’t think it was our headline that did it. It was his own thumbs. A thousand pages of his messages, produced to the Ethics Committee, sitting there in black and white. All we did was make sure the people of Western North Carolina got to read what he wrote.

Since Wednesday my phone hasn’t stopped. Reporters, donors, a couple of old friends from Iowa, all asking some version of the same question: how did it happen so fast?

It didn’t. That’s the answer nobody wants. What you saw was the last 48 hours of a file that took years. The boring years are the whole trick.

Which brings me to the file I’ve been keeping longer than any other.