The Great West Wing Rewatch: 3.3 "Ways and Means"
Joel: We’ve spent a lot of time addressing the potential political backlash of the whole MS scandal, but this episode, for the first time, really gets to unpack the legal issues that are going to come along with it as well. The subpoenas are sent out and we get a scene of Donna having to go through boxes and boxes to try and find all the information that’s being requested. The show is going out of it’s way here to stress the severity of what this can mean legally. Scenes like this happen several times throughout the end of last season and the beginning of this one, just to show the insurmountable amount of information that is going to be scrutinized over. However this is, at it’s heart, a show about the politics of it all, and CJ has the idea that if they can get an “enemy” to do some investigating, it can cast the White House in a more positive light in the public eye, which is a purely political move. Elsewhere we learn that the Estate tax/Death tax might get repealed...