Now you know how #spiritcooking got trending on Twitter after people found mentoin of it in the emails and wanted to know what it was about. After that, people started looking at Podesta's art collection. There's an interview somewhere (NYT? it was some big newspaper, IIRC) talking about how pleased they were this one time some group toured his house or something and were mortified.
But yeah, there's a reason I put so many exclamation marks on that.
I feel sick if I so much at glance at some of those.
They wanted to know what it was about, that's the best summary I know of and it has sources you can look up yourself, many of which aren't covered in your article. There is actual weird stuff that's provable at the core of this--a quick search of 'pizza' in the Podesta dumps will give you at least a few WTF moments.
Yes, you can find unhinged conspiracy stuff written about this. I'm not aware of any proof of anyone committing crimes, nor am I going to claim anyone is guilty without evidence. But there's enough weird that people are going to be digging into this one for a while.
This is not to be taken as an admission that I think the pizzagate stuff is either definitely true or definitely false, merely that their attempt to cover it amounted to "Nothing to see here, please move along" and completely fell flat on its face with actually addressing any of the evidence raised over the course of the affair.