“Current administration officials who have acknowledged contacts with Russian officials include President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as well as Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson,” The Post reported. In that list of three, only Kushner worked on the campaign, works in the White House and has known Russian contacts. This investigation seems to be about more than some low-level campaign staffer shooting the breeze with a Russian diplomat. If it is a very senior person, especially if it is Kushner, it will be hard for many to believe that Trump was not aware of what was going on.

In addition, we now know of 18 alleged contacts between Russians and Trump team members, which would mean Trump’s multiple denials were flat-out untrue. If he knowingly lied, his denials would be seen as part of a coverup.

Perhaps investigators actually will find secret and/or illegal collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russian officials. (We already know there was open collusion by the president and his surrogates — egging on Russian hacking, making hay of the WikiLeaks disclosures in the final days of the campaign and recycling RT propaganda themes.) Nevertheless, the collusion inquiry does not pose the greatest danger to Trump.

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White House lawyers scurrying to research impeachment proceedings know that Trump faces the premature end of his presidency because of the possible obstruction of justice. In plain sight, Trump fired the FBI director, dispatched aides who went out to lie about the reason, confessed on national TV that the firing was about the Russians and then bragged to the Russians he had relieved a lot of “pressure” on himself by canning James B. Comey. The case may be strengthened by comments the president made to Comey, which the FBI director documented contemporaneously in memos. On Sunday on CNN, even an evasive Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) conceded, “If any president tries to impede an investigation, any president, no matter who it is, by interfering with the FBI, yes, that would be problematic. It would be not just problematic. It would be, you know, obviously potential obstruction of justice that people have to make a decision on, any president.”

Conservative David French — no liberal conspiratorialist — argues:

It’s hard to think of statements better calculated to build the case that Trump fired Comey to disrupt the FBI investigation into his administration’s ties with Russia. As I’ve said before, no single piece of evidence has thus far been conclusive (and each piece is vulnerable to its own rebuttals), but the evidence taken together is starting to build a case that looks an awful lot like this: First, Trump — frustrated at the FBI’s investigation — strongly hinted to James Comey that he should clear Michael Flynn. Second, Trump got angry when Comey not only ignored his suggestion but instead publicly confirmed the investigation’s existence. Third, Trump terminated Comey in the hope that it would ease the pressure on his administration. Moreover, there’s evidence that he knew his actions were suspect. He allegedly asked the vice president and attorney general to leave the room before talking to Comey about ending the Flynn investigation, and when he fired Comey, he justified it with a blatantly pretextual and false cover story.

Contrary to cable TV chatter the FBI need not prove collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign to go after Trump or others for obstruction. I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby after all was convicted in the Valerie Plame incident of obstruction, perjury and lying to an investigator in a leak investigation that continued after the prosecutor knew the source of the leak. In Iran-Contra, a slew of senior officials were indicted and then convicted or entered into plea deals for obstruction, perjury, withholding evidence and the like. In Watergate, of course, President Richard Nixon did not face impeachment for conspiracy to commit a burglary but for ordering the CIA to squash the FBI’s investigation. In all these cases, the underlying wrongdoing at some point becomes oddly irrelevant.