A dozen subpoenas and a seized phone later, the president says he had nothing to do with it.

…(cont) I'm out in the garage when I start working this one through, because the car's acting up again — turns over three times before it catches — and I've got the hood up, and I'm thinking about days of the week the way you think about things when your hands are busy and your head isn't. Monday. That's the day he said it. So I go sit in the driver's seat a minute, just to get the order straight, because order is the whole thing here.

Monday morning, before the President says a word to anybody, federal agents in HSI jackets are already at Congresswoman Omar's house in Washington. They've got a warrant. They take her phone. I wrote this down too — more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas, out to her relatives, and those went out the Friday before, so whoever decided to do this had the whole weekend to think about it. Monday morning, the agents go in. Monday afternoon, the President stands in front of the cameras and says what I underlined.

Here's the question I actually wrote down to ask, the one a page can answer: is the investigation into paperwork the congresswoman's own late father filled out for her when she was a child — immigration paperwork, from back when she wasn't old enough to sign her own name to anything — and is the stated aim of that investigation, by the reporting, to take her citizenship and remove her from the country? I've got that on the same page, lower corner, because I had to read it twice to believe it was the lede and not the kicker.

I go back inside — there's a dog that hangs around the corner store and follows me home some days, doesn't belong to anybody in particular, just shows up — and I'm thinking about the drawer in my own house with the kids' old paperwork in it, report cards, a copy of a birth certificate, that kind of thing. Nobody's ever subpoenaed my brother-in-law over what's in that drawer. I don't say that to brag. I say it because it's the only part of this I can check against my own life, and it doesn't check out, and I wrote that down without meaning to.

So here's where I land, which is nowhere, because landing isn't my job. The agents went in Monday morning. The President spoke Monday afternoon. The investigation, the Justice Department says, was carried out under a warrant a judge signed. Whether the warrant and the denial trace back to the same building is not written on my page, and I'm not going to pretend it is.

Oh — before I close this up. One thing I almost walked out the door without asking. That paperwork the whole investigation runs on, the one from when she was a kid — whose name is on it?

Hers. It's always been hers.