We've known for years now that high-level Republican leadership was looking the other way. Now we also know just a bit about how deep those efforts may have gone in the party, and in the government. For example, there’s Barbara Ledeen, a long-time aide to Sen. Chuck Grassley and a member of the Judiciary Committee staff. She is also married to Michael Ledeen, who co-authored a book with Michael Flynn. Ledeen, according to the Mueller report, was working with Trump aide Flynn in the attempt to get Hillary Clinton's emails. "Ledeen began her efforts to obtain the Clinton emails before Flynn's request, as early as December 2015," Mueller details. That month, she emailed another of Flynn's conspirators, Peter Smith, with a proposal to obtain Clinton's private emails. She said the emails "were classified" and had been "purloined by our enemies." According to Mueller's report, the proposal said the "Clinton email server was, in all likelihood, breached long ago," and that the Chinese, Russian, and Iranian intelligence services could "re-assemble the server's email content."

She told Smith in an email that "if even a single email was recovered and the providence [sic] of the email was a foreign service, it would be catastrophic to the Clinton campaign." The report says that Ledeen did obtain the cache of emails. In a statement released Thursday, Grassley's spokesperson said "Ledeen's inquiry was not authorized by the Judiciary Committee" and she did this in her "personal time" out of "concern for her two sons who are Marines and daughter who serves as a civilian." Yes, she was looking for information to destroy the Clinton campaign not out of partisan politics, but because of her children.

Ledeen's position on the Judiciary Committee staff wasn't jeopardized at all by this activity, which was first revealed by the FBI in 2016, and her name was initially redacted in the FBI’s documents. The committee confirmed her involvement then. But she wasn't dismissed. Instead, Grassley's spokesperson says, "She was instructed not to do any further follow-up once the committee learned of her involvement." Just to make this point very clear: She was working for the Senate Judiciary Committee, and her job was in fact to help vet nominees, and she was trafficking classified emails she knew were stolen by foreign adversaries to try to torpedo a presidential campaign. And she kept her job.

The nation faces a dire crisis right now, with Donald Trump in the White House. But it's a crisis that's been a long time in coming—as long as the Republican Party has determined that any ends justify the means of winning power—as far back as Richard Nixon and all the way through Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to Donald Trump. Read again that quote from McConnell on Trump: "I want to win the election, and I have to say Donald Trump has done a good job so far of winning elections. […] I hope he can win one more." He knew very well what Trump was, and he didn't give a damn, as long as he won.

That's the cancer on the nation: the Republican Party. Trump is just the oozing manifestation of it. From McConnell on down to Barr and to who knows how many rank-and-file Republican operatives, the party is utterly, irredeemably corrupted. Until it is completely eradicated, ground down into the dirt and that earth salted and the party forced to start from scratch, we can't be whole as a nation again.