The most astonishing scandal in US history

All signs are that Putin has dirt on Trump

Let us sit back, just for a moment, and absorb the reality of the revelations of the past few days.

For apparently the first time in history, the U.S. president himself was the subject of a counterintelligence investigation. This means that his ties to a hostile power were significant enough to overcome the high bar the FBI would have to clear to investigate any American for possibly being influenced or compromised by another country — much less its own chief executive.

We have also learned that the president has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal his discussions with an enemy foreign leader, not only from intelligence and foreign policy figures in his own administration, but even from the senior officials of his own Oval Office. And he has tried, in this area as in so many others, to wall himself off from congressional oversight.

The president’s enablers are dismissing all of this as just more of a “Deep State” conspiracy set in motion by an FBI aggrieved by the firing of James Comey. Enraged Trump opponents, meanwhile, are convinced this is evidence of a Manchurian Candidate who is now the Red President.

The Deep State story is nonsense. The Mole in the Oval image is too extreme — but not as crazy a theory as it was a year or two ago. The president clearly has something to hide.

It seems at this point beyond argument that Trump personally fears Russian President Vladimir Putin for reasons that can only suggest the existence of compromising information. Despite the lurid fantasies of the president’s opponents, however, this information is most likely regarding the possible entanglement of Trump’s finances in New York with the Russian mob, Russian intelligence and the Russian government over the past decades.

Americans who are trying to think through the implications of these new developments more calmly should bear in mind three disturbing realities:

❚ The existence of the counterintelligence investigation is not a scandal. Indeed, it would be scandal if we found out today that it did not exist. Trump’s behavior regarding Russia has always presented a serious security concern. But when he fires the director of the FBI and then brags about it to actual Russians, only the most stupid or craven law enforcement agency would decline to investigate what to any counterintelligence officer would be the brightest of dozens of flashing red lights. The FBI had no choice. It was doing the job Americans count on it to do.

❚ The president’s attempts to hide the content of his conversations with Putin are not only abnormal but also deeply suspect. The intelligence community, members of Congress and the public should always be anxious whenever any American official talks to a top Russian leader and then tries to seize the notes. This kind of behavior violates practices of sensible diplomacy and intelligence analysis, and no one acts this way for innocent reasons.

❚ It is exhausting but nonetheless necessary to point out again the titanic hypocrisy of the Republican Party and of Trump’s apologists in the conservative media. If President Barack Obama had confiscated the notes of a meeting with the Iranian president, or Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager were sitting in jail for lying about meeting a Chinese business associate — and alleged intelligence officer — to share polling data, the GOP would be impeaching everyone from the president to the White House chef.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Trump team ties to Russia could make these new revelations sound like distant fires compared with the bombshells about to explode. But even had Mueller never been named, we are already in the midst of the most astonishing scandal in American history.

What happens next is unknowable. But for Trump’s supporters to double down in the face of mounting evidence that the president himself is, somehow, compromised by our most dedicated enemy — while making excuses for his secretive behavior by attacking the men and women of the FBI — is a road so dark that perhaps even Joseph McCarthy would not have dared walk it.