President Donald Trump is demanding that the Justice Department transfer $230 million in taxpayer dollars into his own personal bank account. He can do this, because thanks to the Supreme Court’s recent decisions, the executive branch could accurately be described by King Louis XIV—L’état, c’est Trump. > When Trump says this is his decision to make, he’s probably right. At first you might think, ‘Can he do that? Can he just shakedown the DOJ for roughly a quarter of a billion dollars?’ And then you think about the Supreme Court opinions under Chief Justice John Roberts, in which the court has shifted the fundamental structure of American government such that federal agencies, including the Justice Department, are mere extensions of the president’s will. Trump, always on the lookout for the next grift, understands the immense power this bestows on him. The colossal cash transfer he is demanding is being described as compensation for investigations the department launched into Russia’s interventions in the 2016 election and Trump’s absconding with classified documents after his first term. Now that he’s back in the White House, Trump plans to make the government pay for its appropriate use of its ability to investigate and prosecute to safeguard our democracy. And he grasps the fact that he has the absolute power to do that. “With the country, it’s interesting, because I’m the one that makes the decision,” Trump said Tuesday, responding to news of the impending payments. “That decision would have to go across my desk. And it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.” > Trump: "It's awfully strange to make a decision where I'm paying myself. But I > was damaged very greatly and any money I would get I would give to charity." > > — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-10-21T21:17:21.012Z Strange indeed—especially since, technically, it is senior Justice Department officials who would officially sign off on the payments, not the president: Breaking the story on Tuesday, the New York Times framed the ethical conflict around the fact that several of the DOJ officials who could sign off on the payments were formerly Trump’s personal lawyers. That’s corruption, of course, but in the old school way of putting cronies in a position to help you. But we’re in a new world now, and Trump himself gets this: He decides, because he effectively controls every decision made at every agency (with the possible exception of the Federal Reserve). If he doesn’t like a decision, he can fire the person responsible. Their desk is now his desk. Don’t just take it from him: the Supreme Court said so. In a series of opinions, Chief Justice John Roberts has reinterpreted the Constitution to give Trump this power. This warping of our constitutional order is known as the unitary executive theory, and it posits that the framers gave the president complete control over the executive branch. Last summer, Roberts authored the infamous immunity decision, Trump’s forever Get Out of Jail Free card, which protected presidents from virtually all prosecution for official acts. That decision not only permitted Trump to break the law, it also gave him unfettered control over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the DOJ—which presumably includes issuing payments to those he claims should be compensated for investigations gone awry. Which all is to say that when Trump says this is his decision to make, he’s probably right. As Roberts has handed the presidency more and more power over every inch of the government, he has never copped to the fact that he was enabling corruption, theft, or autocracy. Absurdly, he claimed to be increasing democratic accountability. “The framers made the president the most democratic and politically accountable official in government,” he wrote in a 2020 decision, because “only the president (along with the vice president) is elected by the entire nation.” It’s hard to take this with a straight face; the electoral college allows a president to win fewer votes and still assume office, and a president in his second term will not face voters again. (Although Trump may try.) Undeterred by these facts, Roberts wrote in a 2021 case that all executive branch decisions are ultimately the president’s to make: The executive power “acquires its legitimacy and accountability to the public through ‘a clear and effective chain of command’ down from the President, on whom all the people vote.” The absurdity of Roberts’ decision was laid bare Tuesday: The president gets to pay himself hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars, because he controls all executive branch personnel and all of their decisions, and there’s probably nothing anyone can do about it. It sure doesn’t feel like our democratic accountability has increased. Of course, Congress could and should pass a law prohibiting such payments, and dare the Supreme Court to strike it down—but this Congress is unlikely to do even that bare minimum in response. What’s to stop Trump from paying allies the same way? Have them file a complaint with DOJ over some legal skirmish, and then order the department to pay them their reward. If Trump gains control of the Federal Reserve—as he is asking the Supreme Court to give him—he could similarly transform the country’s central bank into his own “bottomless slush fund,” as the Atlantic’s Rogé Karma reported last month. He could use the Fed to pay his businesses, his friends, and his donors. He could even keep ICE’s operations active by hiring private contractors during a government shutdown, Karma points out, circumventing Congress’ power of the purse. If Trump will transfer a quarter billion dollars from the taxpayers to himself, it’s clear that he wouldn’t shy away from any of these uses—and probably find more ways to profit that we haven’t even dreamt. Roberts can claim that he’s expanding democratic accountability. But at this point, we can all see the mess he’s created. A man who takes from the voters to line his pockets is not feeling all that accountable to anyone.

Ed Martin, the acting US attorney in Washington, who has earned some notoriety through attempts to use his office to attack political opponents of the Trump administration, recently turned his sights on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian efforts to help President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. But Martin’s latest effort—a letter alleging misconduct by a former Mueller prosecutor—appears to lift language directly from an article that appeared five years ago in a conservative news outlet, and comes after Martin hired a press aide with a public vendetta against the Mueller team members who investigated him. On Monday, Martin wrote to Aaron Zelinsky, a former federal prosecutor, who as part of Mueller’s team won convictions of political operative Roger Stone (for lying to Congress about his role in the leaking of Democratic emails stolen by Russian hackers) and of former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos (for lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts). Trump pardoned both men in late 2020. In the April 14 letter, Martin asserts that Zelinsky, while prosecuting Papadopoulos, made “false statements” that helped send “an innocent man to jail in an attempt to advance the false narrative that the campaign of a serving President had colluded with Russia to win the presidency.” As a prominent former member of the Mueller team, Zelinsky is a target for Trump allies still looking to discredit that probe and erase Mueller’s findings that Moscow, with the knowledge of Trump aides, interfered in the 2016 election to assist Trump. Zelinsky also testified before the House Judiciary Committee in 2020 that then-Attorney General William Barr had pressured prosecutors to lower their recommended sentence for Stone due to Stone’s ties to Trump. Martin’s letter to Zelinsky was reported on Tuesday by the New York Sun, a conservative publication, and posted online by a pro-Trump writer. Its disclosure came shortly after Martin hired Michael Caputo, a veteran GOP operative and longtime colleague and friend of Stone, as a press adviser. Martin also recently hired Neil McCabe, a former reporter for far-right outlets Breitbart and One America News, as another media aide. Caputo was investigated by Mueller’s team over his own Russian contacts in 2016, though he was not charged with any wrongdoing. He has since regularly expressed anger over the probe. As recently as December, Caputo called for the prosecution of what he calls the “perpetrators” of the Russia investigation. Martin’s letter cites an August 2018 sentencing memo signed by Zelinsky, which notes that Papadopoulos’ lies to FBI agents “impeded the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election” and hindered their ability to question a suspected Russian agent. That man, Joseph Mifsud, had contacted Papadopolous in London in 2016, and informed him, before it was public knowledge, that Russian hackers had stolen emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and planned to anonymously release them. Martin’s letter includes, without attribution, a paragraph that appears to be copied verbatim from a February 2020 article published by Just the News, a right-leaning outlet launched that year by John Solomon, who at the time was under fire for working closely with Trump allies who were pushing bogus claims about Joe Biden’s involvement in Ukraine. “But FBI 302 reports detailing agents’ interviews with Papadopoulos show that he had in fact supplied information that would have enabled investigators to challenge or potentially detain or arrest Mifsud while he was in the United States,” that passage lifted from Just the News says. Martin’s letter contends that Zelinsky should have noted in court filings that Papadopoulos offered information that might have helped agents track Mifsud. Martin does not dispute that Papadopoulos lied to FBI agents about his contacts with Mifsud by claiming the interaction came before he joined the Trump campaign—a crime that Papadopoulos admitted as part of a guilty plea and for which he served a 14-day sentence. Martin’s spokespersons did not respond to questions about the letter, including why he chose this week to borrow wording from a five-year-old story to attack the Mueller investigation. Zelinsky did not respond to an email seeking comment. Martin’s letter to Zelinsky came a day after Stone on Sunday morning tweeted out the Just the News story, along with a prediction that Zelinsky’s “indictment is imminent.” Caputo followed suit about 45 minutes later. Neither mentioned that the story was old news. > THIS IS FULL BLOWN CORRUPTION! > > Declassified FBI memos undercut Mueller team claims that Papadopoulos hindered > Russia probe | Just The News https://t.co/RFdjM3DUDT > > — Michael R. Caputo (@MichaelRCaputo) April 13, 2025 Zelinsky was part of a team of Mueller investigators who investigated Caputo and Stone’s contacts with Russians in 2016, when both were aiding the Trump campaign. The investigation examined a May 2016 meeting between Caputo and Stone and a Russian expat living in Florida, who offered to sell damaging information about Hillary Clinton. No deal was reached, but as the Washington Post reported, the meeting caused legal worries for Stone and Caputo, each of whom told the House Intelligence Committee in 2017 that they had not had any contact with Russians during the 2016 campaign. Both later said they had forgotten about the meeting. Caputo was not charged in the case. Stone was indicted in 2019 for lying extensively to the lawmakers about another matter—his efforts to influence WikiLeaks’ release of hacked Democratic emails—and for witness tampering. Caputo, who has credited Stone with acting as a professional mentor, raised money for Stone’s legal defense, attended his trial, and was even ejected from the courtroom for turning his back on the jury after Stone’s conviction. Both Stone and Caputo have since expressed animus toward people involved in the investigation. Last year, Mediate reported audio from 2020 in which Stone told an associate, a former New York City police officer, to “abduct” and “punish” Zelinsky. Stone later claimed the tape was “AI manipulation.” Caputo was again involved in alleged Russian maneuvers after he hosted a January 2020 film aired by One America News titled “The Ukraine Hoax: Impeachment, Biden Cash, and Mass Murder.” In 2021, a US intelligence report said alleged Russian agents—including Andriy Derkach, a former Ukrainian legislator whom the Treasury Department has called a Russian intelligence asset, and Konstantin Kilimnik, whom a 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee report identified as “a Russian intelligence officer”—had “met with and provided materials to Trump administration-linked US persons” in an effort to help Trump win the 2020 election. As part of that endeavor, the men and their associates “helped produce” a documentary. In 2021 Mother Jones reported this was a reference to the OAN program Caputo hosted. Caputo said at the time that he was not aware of Russian government involvement in the segment and had not spoken to Derkach or Kilimnik about the film. Martin has also been involved with Russian propaganda. He appeared more than 150 times between 2016 and 2024 on RT and Sputnik, the Washington Post recently reported, and failed to mention those appearances in a Senate disclosure form. Those are Russian government-funded networks that various US government reports have said function as Kremlin propaganda arms. In some of those appearances, Martin repeated dubious Russian talking points. In early 2022, for instance, Martin criticized US government warnings that Russia was preparing to attack Ukraine. He claimed there was “no evidence” of a Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s border. That statement came nine days before Russia invaded Ukraine. Martin’s Russian TV appearances, and his flubbed attack on Zelinsky, are the latest in a long list of stumbles by the activist turned US attorney, who faces disbarment efforts, along with bi-partisan opposition to his Senate nomination, including a hold placed by Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif). The embattled US Attorney is unlikely to win confirmation without help from Trump. Martin appears to be working hard to try to secure that.

Devin Nunes, the ex-California congressman and current head of Trump’s struggling social media platform, Truth Social, is getting his prize for being the next president’s long-serving yes-man. On Saturday, Trump announced that he would appoint Nunes as chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, a group of up to 16 private citizens who get high-level security clearance to advise the president on “the effectiveness with which the [intelligence community] is meeting the nation’s intelligence needs.” In his Truth Social post announcing the news, Trump said Nunes would assume the role “while continuing his leadership of Trump Media & Technology Group,” the company that runs Truth Social. The role reportedly does not require Senate confirmation. As my colleague David Corn has reported, as former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Nunes attacked the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election as a baseless partisan smear by Democrats—which, in Trump’s eyes, made him uniquely qualified to receive top-level security clearance. “Devin will draw on his experience as former Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and his key role in exposing the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, to provide me with independent assessments of the effectiveness and propriety of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s activities,” Trump wrote in the announcement. Nunes will draw on a robust track record of foot entering mouth. He compared homeless people to a “zombie apocalypse”; created a fake news site that insisted male privilege doesn’t exist; sued both the Fresno Bee, a local newspaper in California’s Central Valley, and a satirical Twitter account purporting to be his cow. The Bee famously once called him “Trump’s stooge.” That seems to be the main qualification needed for the next admin.

For eight years, an article of faith within Trumpworld and the right-wing media cosmos has been that the Trump-Russia scandal was a hoax, a canard cooked up by nefarious Deep State actors and bolstered by their co-conspirators in the press and the Democratic Party to sabotage and destroy Donald Trump. Trump himself continues to rail in shorthand about “Russia, Russia, Russia.” He has pointed to this “witch hunt” as evidence of extensive corruption within the intelligence and law enforcement communities of the federal government and called for the criminal prosecution of those whom he accuses of orchestrating this diabolical plot against him. How then to explain his decision to tap for top national security slots in his cabinet two Republican legislators with access to top-secret information who have previously confirmed that Vladimir Putin in 2016 attacked the US election to help elect Trump president and that Trump failed as an American leader to acknowledge and condemn this devious assault on the republic? One of these lawmakers even oversaw an investigation that concluded the most senior Trump campaign aide in 2016 had colluded with a Russian intelligence officer while the Kremlin was mounting its information warfare against America. > “I am concerned about some of the contacts between Russians and surrogates > within the Trump Organization and the Trump campaign,” Elise Stefanik, Trump’s > pick as UN ambassador, said in 2018. The pair are Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), whom Trump has picked to be UN ambassador, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Flas), whom Trump has selected to be secretary of state. Each is a veteran member of the intelligence committee of the chamber in which they serve and privy to the most sensitive secrets of US intelligence. After the 2016 contest, Trump tried to con the public about the Russian attack—which included a hack-and-leak operation that disseminated stolen Democratic emails and materials to harm Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and a covert social media scheme to spread messages, memes, and disinformation to sow discord and benefit Trump. The intelligence community and cybersecurity firms had concluded the Kremlin had waged this secret campaign against the United States to boost Trump, but Trump claimed no such thing happened. He dismissed all talk of the multiple contacts between the Trump camp and Russian representatives during the 2016 contest. He also covered up his own secret business dealings with Russian developers and Putin’s office during the campaign, as well as a hush-hush meeting held between his senior campaign advisers and a Moscow intermediary.  Stefanik didn’t buy Trump’s subterfuge. In an interview with the Watertown Daily Times in March 2018, she said, “Russia meddled in our electoral process.” And she noted the Kremlin skullduggery was designed to benefit Trump: “We’ve seen evidence that Russia tried to hurt the Hillary Clinton campaign.” Moreover, she fretted about the curious Trump-Russia contacts: “I am concerned about some of the contacts between Russians and surrogates within the Trump Organization and the Trump campaign.” A year later, with Trump still pushing his phony “Russia hoax” claim, Stefanik, at a town hall meeting, disagreed with the Trump line that the Moscow assault was no big deal. It was, she said, “much more systemic, much more targeted, with very sophisticated hacking efforts, disinformation efforts targeted to specific campaigns.” Stefanik added that the Trump administration needed to be pressed “to take the threat from Russia very seriously.” She criticized the Trump campaign for holding that covert meeting with the Moscow go-between.  There was no Russia witch-hunt, Stefanik contended. According to her view, Trump was peddling a self-serving and false narrative about an important issue of national security: an attack by a foreign adversary on the United States. Rubio went much further than this. As chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Rubio, in August 2020, released a massive 966-page report on the Russian assault. In a press release, he noted, “Over the last three years, the Senate Intelligence Committee conducted a bipartisan and thorough investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election and undermine our democracy. We interviewed over 200 witnesses and reviewed over one million pages of documents. No probe into this matter has been more exhaustive.” And he stated the committee “found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.” That is, no hoax. The detailed report confirmed what other investigations had concluded: “Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information [via WikiLeaks] damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.” Worse for Trump, the report pointed out that he and his campaign had tried to exploit the Russian assault and had aided and abetted it by denying the Russians were engaged in such activity, thus helping Moscow cover up its effort to subvert an American election: “The Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump’s electoral prospects. Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks. The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.” Rubio’s report was full of damning information for Trump. A large chunk focused on Paul Manafort, who was a senior Trump campaign official in 2016. The committee noted that Manafort, who was imprisoned in 2018 for committing fraud and money laundering (and pardoned by Trump in 2020), posed a “grave counterintelligence threat” due to his Russian connections. The report detailed his extensive dealings during the campaign with a onetime business associate named Konstantin Kilimnik, who the committee described as a “Russian intelligence officer.” The committee put it bluntly: “Kilimnik likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services.” Throughout the election, according to the report, Manafort “directly and indirectly communicated with Kilimnik,” Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and several pro-Russian oligarchs in Ukraine. When the report was released, Rubio declared in a press release that the committee had uncovered “absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election.” Yet that was misleading. The report stated, “The Committee obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the [Russian intelligence service’s] hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” That meant Trump’s campaign manager was in close contact with a Russian intelligence officer possibly tied to Putin’s covert attack on the 2016 campaign. The committee also revealed it had found “two pieces of information” that “raise the possibility” that Manafort himself was connected “to the hack-and-leak operations.” Perhaps there was some collusion. But the report’s discussion of that information was redacted. Rubio’s report was a slam-dunk counter to the Trump-Russia deniers on the right who had strived mightily to turn this serious matter into nothing but a left-wing fantasy, and to Trump himself. It declared that Trump’s campaign was run by a counterintelligence threat who had covertly huddled with a Russian intelligence officer and that Trump and his lieutenants assisted the Kremlin’s attack on the United States by echoing Putin’s denials. The report was proof Trump had betrayed the nation. This is a truth that he and his enablers within the GOP and the conservative movement have attempted to smother for years. To do so, they concocted the notion of a Deep State conspiracy and relentlessly derided Democrats, liberals, journalists, and anyone else who voiced concern about or interest in Russian interference and Trump’s acquiescence to Moscow. Now Trump has embraced two senior Republican lawmakers who challenged Trump’s claim of a hoax and who affirmed the reality of the Trump-Russia scandal and Trump’s role in it. Were they part of that Deep State scheme against Trump? Neither have renounced their previous statements. Rubio has not disavowed the report he once proudly hailed. As the denizens of MAGA World—and Trump himself—should see it, Rubio and Stefanik were part of the traitorous cabal that pushed disinformation to demolish Trump. In their eyes, Rubio even produced a nearly 1000-page-long report to advance this treasonous con job. Their appointments show the absurdity of Trump’s Russia-denying endeavors—though these efforts succeeded. Now Trump has included in his new administrations two prominent Republicans who know that he has been lying all along about Russia. While both Stefanik and Rubio were once critics of Trump, they have, like most within the GOP, bent the knee, and they don’t mind serving a fellow who provided cover for Putin and who cared more for his own political interests than the country’s security. Nevertheless, it would be worthwhile for Democrats to question Stefanik and Rubio on this matter during their Senate confirmation hearings. They ought to be asked about their previous statements and Rubio’s report. This will probably yield a fair amount of squirming. More important, it will serve as a reminder that Trump has gotten away with a foul deed that has profoundly shaped the nation.

On May 10, 2017, President Donald Trump hosted two special guests in the Oval Office: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. The meeting was curious. It was closed to American media. No American journalists were allowed to witness it or take photos or video of the meeting. But a Russian photographer was permitted to shoot a few pics, and the Russian government posted them. There was much else odd about this get-together. Only a few months earlier, the US intelligence community had released a report confirming that Russian leader Vladimir Putin had mounted a covert operation against the United States to help Trump win the 2016 election. The Kremlin’s clandestine warfare had included the cyber-swiping and dissemination, via WikiLeaks, of Democratic emails and documents and a secret social media campaign that sought to sow discord in the United States and boost Trump’s chances of claiming the White House. The hack-and-leak op fomented conflict at the Democrats’ convention and then, in the final month of the race, impeded Hillary Clinton’s campaign by releasing, nearly on a daily basis, internal documents that prompted negative news stories about her and the Democrats. Throughout all this, Trump and his top aides denied Russia was intervening, essentially aiding and abetting Putin by providing cover for him. Though there were numerous factors that contributed to Clinton’s defeat, the Russian operation was clearly one of them. After the election, the Kremlin’s intervention and the ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow were the subjects of a federal investigation and congressional inquiries. Trump, though, kept denying Russia had meddled in the race and repeatedly called the whole thing a hoax and a witch hunt. (At the time, it was not yet publicly known that during the campaign his top aides met with a Russian emissary who was introduced to them as a participant in a secret Kremlin project to help Trump win or that Paul Manafort, the chair of the Trump campaign, regularly huddled with a former business associate who was a Russian intelligence officer and shared internal campaign data with him.) Irate about the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, Trump, on May 9, 2017, fired the bureau’s director, James Comey. The following day—with the Comey dismissal dominating the news—Trump warmly greeted the two Russians at the White House. The photo that the Russians released showed the three of them yukking it up. Here was Trump with representatives of a foreign adversary that had attacked an American election, and they appeared to be having a jolly time. And the public wasn’t told what they discussed. A few days later, the Washington Post reported that during the meeting Trump had revealed highly classified information about a possible Islamic State plot and jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on this terrorist group. According to the newspaper: > The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner > through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that > details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the > U.S. government, officials said. > > > > The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material > with Russia, and officials said Trump’s decision to do so endangers > cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic > State. One intelligence official noted that Trump had “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.” Intelligence officials were shocked by this breach. More about this meeting continued to come out. The New York Times soon reported that Trump had told the Russians that by dismissing Comey he had gotten himself out of a jam: “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” The Times noted how bizarre this was: “The comments represented an extraordinary moment in the investigation, which centers in part on the administration’s contacts with Russian officials: A day after firing the man leading that inquiry, Mr. Trump disparaged him—to Russian officials.” But there was even more to the meeting that the public wouldn’t learn about for more than two years. In September 2019, the Washington Post revealed that Trump had told Lavrov and Kislyak that he was unconcerned about Moscow’s intervention in the 2016 election and that this assertion had caused alarmed White House officials to limit access to the memo chronicling the conversation. The Trump White House had fretted about this part of the discussion becoming public. According to the newspaper, the “memorandum summarizing the meeting was limited to a few officials with the highest security clearances in an attempt to keep the president’s comments from being disclosed publicly…White House officials were particularly distressed by Trump’s election remarks because it appeared the president was forgiving Russia for an attack that had been designed to help elect him.” By the time this part of the conversation was disclosed, Trump was mired in his first impeachment for having pressured the Ukrainian president to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and to find information discrediting the Trump-Russia scandal. And this revelation, like so many about Trump, quickly faded from the national discourse. It had taken over two years for Americans to learn that Trump had told the Russians he didn’t care about their efforts to subvert a US election. But it was obvious as soon as that original photo was released that Trump had no interest in holding Putin accountable for messing with the election—and for helping him reach the White House.