Let this serve as a mea culpa. People of North Carolina: I was wrong.

Last year, still starry-eyed and idealistic in college at Chapel Hill, I wrote a letter to the editor and submitted it to the News & Observer:

I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, and even applauded what seemed at the time to be an honest attempt to be even-handed during a crucial time in our Republic.

Fool me once, Richard Burr, shame on me!

After release of the Mueller Report yesterday, this information started to circulate: Mueller Report ropes in Senate GOP.

The key bits regarding our senior senator:

Senate Intelligence Chairman Burr (R-N.C.), for instance, apparently supplied the White House counsel’s office with information about FBI investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to the report. The report says that on March 9, 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey briefed congressional leaders and intelligence committee heads on the ongoing investigation into Russian interference. That briefing included “an identification of the principal U.S. subjects of the investigation.”

Burr then corresponded with the White House a week later about the Russia probes, and the White House counsel’s office, led by Don McGahn, “appears to have received information about the status of the FBI investigation,” the special counsel report said.

4/18/19 | Politico

“Kudos to Burr on pushing back against the decisions of those obsequious few (or many) in the House who would seek only to bolster their defense of President Trump, even through covert and backdoor methods, at the cost of public trust in public officials,” I wrote last year. I thought, wrongly, that there was some semblance of respect for the office he has held for so many years.

Boy, was I wrong.

Sen. Richard Burr–who everyone has been treating as conducting a legit investigation–gave Trump’s team a heads up about who was being investigated pic.twitter.com/qEFeY109Kg

— Julie Millican (@JMillzDC) April 18, 2019

I know Richard Burr has sworn off running for re-election in 2022. What that should have meant is that he felt free to act in the best interest of our state and nation, without regard for primary challengers or a tough general. Instead, he showed us who he really was: a hack.