It’s striking that even fervent Trump allies such as Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) were willing to sign on to a report that validates the clear conclusion of every serious person and agency that has examined the 2016 election. Whatever your view of the degree to which Trump himself and his campaign acted to help Russian leader Vladimir Putin in his attack on our system, the fact that the attack took place is beyond dispute.

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Unless you’re Trump himself, or one of his more enthusiastic sycophants. Attorney General William P. Barr is still undertaking an investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation, with the obvious hope of validating Trump’s position that the whole thing should never have happened, and that when the FBI received information indicating that Russia was attempting to manipulate an American presidential election, their response should have been, “Eh, there’s no need to look into it.”

But the report is clear: Putin “approved and directed aspects of this influence campaign,” which “sought to denigrate then-candidate [Hillary] Clinton.” Furthermore, “Putin and the Russian Government demonstrated a preference for candidate Trump.”

Even if you accept that there was no real criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, Trump’s campaign operatives certainly tried, but in a bumbling, haphazard way. There were dozens of contacts, including the famous Trump Tower meeting that Donald Trump Jr. set up after being promised dirt on Clinton from someone he was told was representing the Russian government.

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What there is not is so much as a scintilla of evidence that anyone in the campaign ever said, “Whoa, we can’t get help from Russia, or any other foreign government for that matter. We need to call the FBI.”

Trump certainly wouldn’t have wanted to do that. When asked later what he would do if Russia or another foreign government sought to help him in 2020, he mocked the very idea of alerting the authorities. “Oh, let me call the FBI," Trump scoffed. "Give me a break — life doesn’t work that way.” Not for some people, anyway.

But as the Intelligence Committee wrote, Putin sought “to sow discord, undermine democratic institutions, and interfere in U.S. elections.” If those were Putin’s motivations, it has to be considered one of the most spectacular successes in the history of covert intelligence operations.

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For a relatively modest investment of time and money, Putin created more discord than he could have dreamed of. And what in U.S. history has undermined our democracy more than the person who sits right now in the Oval Office?

Trump has all but obliterated the United States’ standing in the world, subverted the Western alliance in every way he can think of, taken a sledgehammer to one democratic institution after another, and disastrously bungled the response to a pandemic for good measure.

Not only that, Trump was so unapologetic in his corruption that as soon as the special counsel’s investigation into the Russia scandal ended, he got on the phone with the president of Ukraine and tried to strong-arm him into helping Trump’s reelection. You may remember that episode; he got impeached for it.

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I suspect Trump will be only slightly bothered by the Intelligence Committee’s report. He won’t like the fact that those eight Republicans acknowledge Putin’s desire to get him elected, something Trump himself spent so much time denying. But, on the other hand, those same senators also all voted to acquit him in the impeachment trial. They’re in his pocket, and he knows it.

We still don’t know what Putin is planning for our fall campaign, but if history is a guide — and if more chaos is what he’s after — he’ll be coming to Trump’s aid once again. Trump, increasingly desperate as he stares down the possibility of defeat, will be only too welcoming of that help. And maybe in a few years there will be another Intelligence Committee report in which even Republicans admit what happened.