Meanwhile, Trump’s “no collusion” refrain was eviscerated by the indictment charging Roger Stone with obstruction and witness tampering. How many Republicans have repeated ad nauseum that they see no evidence of collusion? They should look again. From the text of the indictment: “A senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact STONE about any additional releases and what other damaging information [WikiLeaks] had regarding the [Hillary] Clinton campaign.” If Trump is anywhere in that chain of “A told B to find out C,” the president was conspiring with others after the campaign had been warned about Russian infiltration attempts — and after the hack of the Democratic National Committee was known.

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Trump, in late July 2016, publicly called on Russia to go find Clinton’s emails. That very day, Russians attempted to hack into Clinton’s emails. Soon after, a cache of DNC emails gets dumped. Days after that, now-former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon (identified in a prior New York Times report) was told (by whom?) to reach out to Stone and find out what else WikiLeaks had. Within hours of the Access Hollywood recording’s release on Oct. 7, WikiLeaks began dumping Clinton’s emails. Bannon, that day, texted his praise to Stone for the WikiLeaks email release. If that isn’t collusion, the word has no meaning. The only question is how much Trump knew and what actions he specifically directed.

In sum, the Republicans' assumption that there was never really any collusion has now been undermined. The assumption that Trump had some clue how to govern and would not put the Senate at risk was blown up, as well. If so many assumptions about the Senate and the evidence in the Russia investigation turned out to be faulty, maybe we should rethink three other assumptions: 1. The Senate will never vote to remove Trump; 2. He’s so popular with the GOP base that any primary challenge would be fruitless; 3. His nomination in 2020 is certain.

If the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report is truly damning (and every filing has surprises, new facts and story lines previously unknown), maybe the Senate will be happy to run Trump out of town — especially if he is polling in the low 30s. If Trump’s presidency has been derailed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the wall never gets built, and Trump continues to make everyone look foolish, it’s not too far a leap to think donors, operatives and other pols will try to find a 2020 alternative. And if the Senate looks like it just might vote to remove him, and/or a credible challenger (or more than one) pops up, I could imagine Trump stomping off — with a pardon in hand from VP Mike Pence.

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