Josh Marshall comes completely correct here. The question of whether the 2016 Trump campaign was in cahoots with the Volga Bagmen is no longer an open one. Through a magnificent piece of blatant fck-up-ery, Paul Manafort's own lawyers gave away the game in a filing in federal court. Then The New York Times added a significant bit of detail, and the whole story runs through Paul Manafort, whose legal status is at the moment as dead as Kelsey's nuts. As Marshall points out:

Manafort allegedly gave instructions to hand the data to Deripaska. The first paragraph suggests a bit more detail. It says both men – Manafort and Gates – “transferred data to Mr. Kilimnik.” This suggests that there were multiple transfers, that both men were transferring data and that it was presumably an on-going process of transfer. It’s possible that that sentence is just clumsily worded and it actually refers just to both men being involved in a single transfer. Manafort gives the data to Gates with instructions to give it to Kilimnik with instructions to give it to Deripaska. But that’s doubtful. What’s crystal clear is that the transfer to Kilimnik came with explicit instructions to give the information to Deripaska. And that’s enough.

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI Getty Images

Deripaska is close to Putin and he has zero use for campaign data about a US election, other than to use it for the then on-going Russian campaign to elect Donald Trump. Remember too that Manafort was in dire financial straits and Deripaska was hunting him down to collect a $19 million debt. Just last week Time tracked down the man Deripaska tasked with getting his money from Manafort. “He owed us a lot of money,” Victor Boyarkin told Time. “And he was offering ways to pay it back … I came down on him hard.”

(Later on Wednesday, Ken Vogel, one of the authors of the Times piece, walked back entirely any reference to Deripaska, tweeting: "PAUL MANAFORT asked KONSTANTIN KILIMNIK to pass TRUMP polling to the Ukrainian oligarchs SERHIY LYOVOCHKIN & RINAT AKHMETOV, & not to OLEG DERIPASKA, as originally reported. We have corrected the story & I deleted a tweet repeating the error.")

If Manafort sold out the American electorate because he was being knuckled by Russian loan-sharks in the employ of one oligarch or another, that's an interesting detail but beside the point. The campaign is the point, and Manafort once was the campaign manager. Data from the campaign was shared with Manafort's favored crooks. Therefore, the campaign was the central part of a conspiracy to defraud the country, an ongoing corrupt enterprise. That circle is now complete.

(An unspoken part of Manafort's defense, and therefore part of the president*'s defense as well, is that Russia is not the thoroughgoing oligarchical kleptocracy that everyone who's done business with it knows that it is. That's pretty much fallen apart, too.)

Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who's set to depart. MANDEL NGAN Getty Images

Which makes Wednesday's other news just a little more ominous. From the Washington Post:

Rosenstein’s departure — whenever it occurs — will likely spark fears about the future of the Mueller probe, though even now Rosenstein is not technically in charge of it. Rosenstein appointed Mueller to investigate whether the president's campaign had coordinated with the Kremlin because then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions was recused from the matter. Special counsels, though, normally answer to the attorney general, so when Sessions was forced out in November, supervision fell to Matthew G. Whitaker, whom Trump chose to serve as acting attorney general.

You think?

People familiar with the investigation say that Rosenstein works as the day-to-day supervisor of the Mueller probe, and that Whitaker has largely stayed out of the particulars of that work, though he has been notified on at least one occasion when a significant court hearing was about to occur. A person familiar with the matter said Rosenstein is not being forced out but instead that he always saw the deputy attorney general job as one that would likely last two years. The person said Rosenstein will likely stay on until after William P. Barr, a former attorney general whom Trump nominated to take the job again, takes office.

And that's going to make Barr's upcoming confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee a pretty compelling show. On Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer used his morning remarks to tell the president* to withdraw Barr's nomination before the committee hearings begin.

Acting Attorney General Whitaker forcefully advocated for defunding and imposing severe limits on the special counsel's investigation, calling it, quote, a mere witch hunt. He has troubling conflicts of interest, not to mention the fact that he appears to have been involved in fraudulent business dealings before joining the Justice Department.

William Barr, the nominee for attorney general Chip Somodevilla Getty Images

The nominee to take his place, William Barr, is just as fatally conflicted a nominee when it comes to the special counsel. Last month we learned that Mr. Barr sent the Justice Department an unsolicited memo criticizing the special counsel's investigation. Mr. Rosenstein's potential departure only heightens the stakes for Mr. Barr's nomination. From all accounts, Mr. Rosenstein has been an impartial actor at the head of the special counsel's investigation.

Now president trump is trying to replace folks like Mr. Rosenstein with conflicted loyalists like Matthew Whitaker and William Barr. The Senate, starting with the Judiciary Committee, should subject Mr. Barr's views to the strictest of scrutiny next week and I still believe, after the revelations about Mr. Barr's unsolicited memo, President Trump ought to withdraw this nomination.

(Elsewhere, Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, told Manu Raju of CNN that he also believes that Barr's name should be withdrawn from consideration.)

We may look back on the incredible bungle by Manafort's lawyers as some kind of beginning of some kind of end—although I believe our grandchildren may be the ones who see the actual end of some Trump scandals. It made things as clear as they had to be. At a very high level, the President* of the United States' election was facilitated by foreign gangsters.

Editor's Note: This post has been updated to reflect a New York Times correction indicating Paul Manafort gave Konstantin Kilimnik instructions to share the Trump polling data with two pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarchs, not Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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