President Donald Trump walks towards the Oval Office through the West Wing Colonnade of the White House. Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images

For President Donald Trump the fake news just got very real – and dangerous. By charging three Trump 2016 campaign operatives with crimes, special counsel Robert Mueller just took the Trump-Russia investigation from the realm of speculation and debate and moved it into sworn testimony and court proceedings. One has pleaded guilty and is cooperating with investigators; the other two, former campaign chief Paul Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates, now have an enormous incentive to cooperate in a bid for leniency. Trump reacted on Twitter by noting that the tax fraud charges against Manafort stem from events "years ago before he joined the Trump campaign." The president reiterated his frequent claim that there was "NO COLLUSION" with Russia in the 2016 campaign. But the third defendant Mueller named Monday renders that claim increasingly tinny.

George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign foreign policy advisor, pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about conversations with an unnamed "professor" connected to the Russian government. The conversations, Mueller's court filing says, concerned "thousands of emails" promising "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. That now makes two acknowledged attempts by the Trump campaign to obtain damaging material about Clinton from representatives of Vladimir Putin's government. The other was a June 2016 meeting arranged by the president's son Donald Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner and Manafort. Until now, the conclusion by U.S. intelligence officials that Russia intervened in the campaign to help Trump win has remained abstract for American voters. The new details, unsealed Monday, made more concrete by Papadopoulos' guilty plea, threaten to further undermine Trump's historically weak political standing for a first-year president. The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows that just 38 percent of Americans approve the president's job performance — his lowest mark of the year. A 58 percent majority disapproves. More significantly, he has suffered erosion among segments of the electorate important to both Trump and Republicans who will face voters in 2018 midterm elections. His approval among independents has fallen to 34 percent, and among whites to 47 percent.