We are now well into a phase of the Trump-Russia collusion scandal where denials are giving way to ridiculous and in many ways contradictory forms of spin and excuse-making.

The Trump-loyalist account of the emerging conspiracy is that there’s no proof that it happened, but if it did, it was legal—and in any case it was a setup. President Donald Trump’s own attorney, the hucksterish movement-conservative lawyer Jay Sekulow, test drove a new and obviously bogus argument on Sunday morning that if the collusion was bad, it’s the Secret Service’s fault for not saving the Trump campaign from itself.

It should be simple enough to defend the status quo ante, when teaming up with hostile foreign intelligence services to wage a political campaign against an American opponent was essentially unimaginable. But only a handful of Republican members of Congress can muster such a defense today. Faced with the easiest question in the world, House Speaker Paul Ryan deployed this cowardly dodge:

Asked if he'd take meeting with foreign source offering campaign info, @SpeakerRyan says "I'm not going to go into hypotheticals." pic.twitter.com/ONemfDJsYJ — ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) July 12, 2017

Republicans like Ryan, who ghoulishly exploited the deaths of Americans in Benghazi, know better than anyone that there’s more to political good behavior than staying within the bounds of criminal law. The GOP’s determination to see no evil in Trump’s conduct foreshadows a horrifying future in which at least one party can team up with whomever they want, so long as the goal is to defeat a domestic political opponent.



“As someone who’s run for office five times, if the devil called me and said he wanted to set up a meeting to give me opposition research on my opponent,” Judge Jeanine Pirro, the maniacal Fox News host, said on Sunday. “I’d be on the first trolley to hell to get it. And any politician who tells you otherwise is a bald-faced liar.” She added that “there is no law that says a campaign cannot accept information from a foreign government.”