Let your mind wander to 407 years ago, or "the week before the election, 2016." Slate had come out with an exhaustive, detailed scoop about this weird server at the Trump Organization that would lie dormant all day except for a few minutes, when it exclusively pinged back and forth with Alfa Bank, in Russia. (Okay, not exclusively: a tiny share of its pings went to Spectrum, a hospital association owned by Betsy DeVos's family.) This is weird! said Slate. We talked to these dudes who invented the Internet, and they say it's weird too! (Not a direct quote.) But within an hour or two, Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times had shat neatly upon it. "Word word word," typed Lichtblau. "It is probably marketing and definitely not the Trump campaign doing weird stuff with Russia, 'law enforcement officials' say!"

F.B.I. officials spent weeks examining computer data showing an odd stream of activity to a Trump Organization server and Alfa Bank. Computer logs obtained by The New York Times show that two servers at Alfa Bank sent more than 2,700 “look-up” messages — a first step for one system’s computers to talk to another — to a Trump-connected server beginning in the spring. But the F.B.I. ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts.

Much later, we learned that in fact, the FBI was still studying the "innocuous" "marketing email or spam." And the FBI hadn't in fact cleared the Trump Org of "weirdness" at all! And what do we learn today from Michael Isikoff at Yahoo! News? Oh, Mueller is just having a little sniff-see to see whether the RNC -- and maybe Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, the NRCC and the NSCC? we are just speculating! -- might have been having some hair-braiding slumber and collusion parties with Putin as well!

The president’s lawyers, Ty Cobb and John Dowd, are pressing [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller to wind down the investigation and exonerate their client, which they have assured the president will happen by early next year. But the sources familiar with the probe say that such a rapid conclusion is — as one put it — “fanciful.” Mueller and his team, they say, are pursuing new leads, interrogating new witnesses and collecting a mountain of new evidence, including subpoenaed bank records and thousands of emails from the campaign and the Trump transition. In just the last few weeks, his prosecutors have begun questioning Republican National Committee staffers about the party digital operation that worked with the Trump campaign to target voters in key swing states. They are seeking to determine if the joint effort was related to the activities of Russian trolls and bots aimed at influencing the American electorate, according to two of the sources.

The smart money -- if you, like us, have a touch of Conspiracy Theorist in you -- is on a vast rightwing conspiracy that worked like so:

1. Russia hacked into the voter rolls (and vendor systems!) of 33 states. (Don't believe us? Ask The Intercept!) If Russian hackers didn't actively delete Democratic voters from the voter rolls, they probably ....

2. synched them up via the Trump Org server and Alfa Bank's server (and DeVos's Spectrum Health!) before ...

3. marrying them through Cambridge Analytica, whose American subsidiary is owned by the billionaire wingnut Mercer family and just happens to have one Stephen Bannon on its board, in order to target vulnerable peel-off-able lefties via dark Facebook posts remind them all of Hillary Clinton's constant need to murrrrrder and also rape! (Hillary Clinton loves rape.)

4. And now Paul Ryan and his merry band of granny-rapers might be in trouble because mayyyyybe they worked with the Russian bots and influence campaign too. (They did, after all, accept stolen material and data from Guccifer 2.0 that helped them to target Democratic candidates quite precisely.)

Now, we know that thinking Trump colluded with Russia is a crime against acknowledging that Hillary Clinton is the worst candidate to ever grace our national stage, and she should be shunned and also take up knitting. And there are many people on Twitter who will tell us THEY never fell for a Facebook ad, no way, and how dare we not just admit Clinton didn't campaign in Wisconsin and then give her a good curb job! Propaganda and information warfare probably don't even exist, and besides, is it even "illegal" to accept anything of value from a foreign government for your campaign? (Actually, it is! And James O'Keefe once made an entire GOTCHA video about the Hillary campaign selling a Canadian a T-shirt.)

Anyway, we are just saying that we have been hoping for an awful long time that Robert Mueller and his team of lusty fired sexters had caught on to this weird Cambridge Analytica/RNC/ALFA GODDAMN BANK TRUMP ORG BETSY DEVOS JESUS CHRIST IT JUST KEEPS GOING, and also that Paul Ryan should go to jail, just on general principles.

[Yahoo!]

We got a monkey on our back, and what it needs is MORE COWBELL. Or money. Probably money.