I'm going to take a wild guess. Most of what's needed to remove President Donald Trump is already known. Former President Barack Obama knew it. His administration knew it. The 17 agencies that are defending America against foreign threats knew it.

But what are you supposed to do with that knowledge after the country completes a quadrennial process of democratically electing a new president? We don't have do-overs. Years from now, looking back, we may understand finally that the integrity of our democracy depended on patriots discreetly leaking information while hoping a profound constitutional crisis worked itself out.

As I said, this is a guess – for now, a wild one. It will be months, perhaps years, before a full and fair accounting is public. But the way the scandal is transpiring, drip by drip, suggests most of what's needed to remove this president is already known.

What could not have been known, surely, is the lengths to which this president has gone to suppress what's known. That may be enough, at least, for impeachment in the House. As they say, it's not the crime but the cover up.

Before the Justice Department appointed Robert Mueller as special prosecutor, I thought impeachment and removal had a snowball's chance of succeeding. But that snowball now appears to be snowballing in a hurry. Of equal importance is that Mueller's investigation might not stop with Trump. It may end up touching top Republicans before the end, and give the impression that the Republican Party, as it currently stands, is not a political organization so much as an insurgency that's undermining the American republic.

On Monday, former national security advisor Michael Flynn told a Senate panel investigating collusion between the president and the Russians that he would not incriminate himself with testimony. That suggests Flynn knows a lot more than he's letting on. It also gives those who know what's needed to remove a president incentive to leak more of what's known about his dealings with a hostile foreign power.

Cartoons on President Trump and Russia View All 91 Images

The president appears to have obstructed justice. That crime was sufficient for a Democratic Congress to draw up articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon. Trump knew Flynn was a foreign agent before appointing him to the National Security Council. He asked James Comey, the old FBI director, to drop the case against Flynn. Trump then fired Comey. He later admitted that Russia was top of mind.

But the rot is deeper. Last week, Reuters reported that Flynn and other Trump advisers contacted the Russians at least 18 times during the last seven months of the election. Flynn and his Russian contact had worked to establish "a back channel for communication between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin that could bypass the U.S. national security bureaucracy."

On the one hand, you could say a back channel was needed given the "deep state" is hostile to better U.S.-Russia relations. This is an argument not only on the far right but the far left. On the other hand, you could say, as my Washington Monthly colleague Nancy LaTourneau wrote last week: "This all reads to me like Putin setting up the President of the United States to be a Russian asset. That is as serious as it gets."

Trump is not alone.

U.S. intelligence agencies know Vladimir Putin has supported right-wing parties in Europe to undermine support for NATO and the European Union, both of which the Russian president sees as impediments to restoring the glory of Russia's imperial past. Russia has launched massive propaganda campaigns on social media to move public opinion against certain candidates. As Massimo Calabresi reported in a new Time cover story, Russia is now able to do what it never could during the Cold War: Impact the course of American history. "The vast openness and anonymity of social media," he wrote, "has cleared a dangerous new route for antidemocratic forces."

The Republican Party is helping

Putin has forged ties with figures representing three GOP factions: the anti-gay Christian right, white nationalists and the National Rifle Association. Reacting to the re-election of the country's first African-American president, these factions sought and found common ground with an authoritarian seeking to provide a haven for "white Christian civilization."

Putin appears to have made inroads into the GOP itself. The Washington Post reported a secret recording revealing top Republicans being aware of Putin's incursions before Trump was their nominee. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, now second to House Speaker Paul Ryan, said last June that he thought "Putin is paying" Trump and California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher. McCarthy has since said he was joking, but the New York Times reported over the weekend that U.S. intelligence warned Rohrabacher he was being recruited.

Many have noted why Trump is Putin's "useful idiot." He impugns NATO's viability. He threatens global trade. He deflects from Russia's annexing of old territories by creating an overtly racist version of the clash of civilizations, with the Islamic State group on the side of evil and white Christians on the side of good.

But no one to my knowledge has noted why the Republicans themselves are equally useful idiots. If you want to destabilize your enemy, what better way than to eliminate health care for more than 24 million Americans; by redistributing massive amounts of wealth upward to a global 1 percent that may or may not feel patriotic loyalty to the United States; or by slashing environmental policies that protect Americans' air, soil and water but that obstruct Russian efforts to explore and colonize the resource-rich Arctic Circle?

What better way to continue destabilizing an enemy than by convincing a cross-section of the Republican Party that the Republican Party isn't threatening America, with or without Russia's blessing? Instead, as NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre recently said, it's "academic elites, political elites, and media elites. These are America's greatest domestic threats."

The Republicans chose explicitly to serve party over country around the time of Obama's election. From that point on, there was no downside to a campaign of massive resistance to a biracial president who appeared, to many uninformed Republicans, to be an agent of a foreign power. That was a fateful decision. It made the Republicans vulnerable not only to an insurgent candidate willing to say anything but to a foreign power willing to say anything.