They are trying to fill in the dots

Kylie Atwood from CNN said this on The Lead with Jake Tapper, June 7. She was talking about the State Department looking into unreported foreign gifts to Trump. Here is the transcript:

https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/cg/date/2022-06-07/segment/02

This is a congruent conflation of “connect the dots” and “fill in the blanks”, both meaning to understand something by providing information. While I posted this one previously (said by Doris Kearns Goodwin on the Rachel Maddow Show – https://malaphors.com/2022/01/15/if-they-can-fill-in-the-dots/), it’s such a perfect mashup I thought it was worth a second time.

A big thanks to Jim Kozlowski for hearing this one and sending it in! Koz has the ears of a hawk.