Editorial Coincidence Department

In my piece entitled Mueller's Wall, posted on February 14, I said it looked to me like Gates was going to plead, and if that happened,

the pressure on Manafort will dramatically increase. ..... Manafort was not somebody who can be dismissed by the White House as some lowly gofer.

On February 24, Peter Baker in the New York Times, in a "News Analysis" piece, wrote that Gates had just pleaded, and

The guilty plea by Rick Gates raised the pressure on Manafort,... In the current case, the targets so far have included not just a “coffee boy,” ...  but the president’s top two campaign officials. 

And in my piece I made liberal use of my favorite metaphor, -- the one I used effectively in a trial described in my 2017 memoir. My February 14 blog entry said:

\

This prosecutor is patiently building a wall, and each piece of evidence is but one brick. ....

and,

 If Gates flips,... Another brick in the wall.

 and,

In a telephone conversation involving Trump and Hope Hicks, Mark Corallo ... feared he was listening to a plan for document destruction. ...  and has now accepted an invitation to spill all to Mueller's team. More bricks in Mueller's wall.

Ten days later, Baker wrote: 

With each passing day, Robert S. Mueller ... seems to add another brick to the case he is building.

Do I think Mr. Baker was substantively influenced by my post? Nah. I have no reason to believe he even saw it, though he is more than welcome to check it out. But I did get a kick out of his eventually tumbling not only to what I had said, but how I said it.

Oh, yeah, one more point. Mr. Baker doesn't publish an  email address, and I ain't a bird that tweets, so if anyone out there does get in contact with him, please suggest he consult the venerable New Yorker series called "Block that Metaphor:''  One  adds a brick to a "wall."  Adding a brick to a "case" stimulates no mental picture, which is what metaphors are all about.

So there.

A bientot.