1. To me, the most interesting thing about the flurry of legal action around Cohen, Nat'l Enquirer, Flynn, Manafort, Butina, etc., was how much of it 1) 1has already been reported or 2) could be logically deduced (like that the payoffs of the 2 women were directed by Trump)
2. Because this probe has lasted 2 years, been slow and methodically, with lots of great journalism filling in the gaps, we probably know the broad outline of the Trump-Russia conspiracy. Team Trump will wave the lack of a closing "bombshell" as a red flag that Mueller failed
3. But what Team Trump is really hoping is that Americans have grown numb to what in fact is the most outrageous electoral conspiracy in U.S. history, whose contours have been revealed to us, drip by drip, over the last two years.
4. Here's the reality we need to come to terms with: Congress and the American people had -- by Trump's first few months in office -- more evidence of criminality against the president than what was used to oust Nixon over Watergate in 1974
5. The "smoking (or 'smocking') gun" tape that sunk Nixon and caused Republican leaders to march down Capitol Hill and tell the 37th POTUS to resign was Nixon using his power to derail the FBI and obstruct the probe - exactly what Trump admitted to after he fired Comey
6. And that's in addition to the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, also more damning than anything we know about the Watergate break-in. Collusion? We've long known the quids (Russian hacking of DNC, "fake news" on FB) and quos (RNC platform change, sanctions relief promises).
7. Simply put, some folks are waiting for a "bombshell" while a slow-motion demolition of American democracy has taken place right before our eyes. Mueller's final moves could drop a real shocker, but they may not. We need to accept that the real shock is what we already know,
8. That's why the focus needs to shift from what else we're going to learn about Trump-Russia -- we may already know 97 percent of it -- to what Congress and the rest of the establishment will do about the most dangerous conspiracy in our history, already in plain sight
9. The question going forward is whether what we already know -- that a U.S. presidential election was won through fraud, theft, lying, illegal payoffs and other criminal acts -- will have real consequences for the man who stole that election, Donald Trump.
10. If not, we can stop publishing all those books about whether democracy is dying. It will be already long dead. -30-
