Well, ever since our last episode of Moscow on the Potomac, we have learned that the president* is thinking about giving the Russians back the pleasure palaces that his predecessor confiscated as punishment for Russian meddling in our election. (We have the quid and we have the quo. We're just investigating the extent of the pro at the moment.) We also have learned that the attorney general, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, conveniently forgot during his sworn testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and in his letter to that committee "correcting" his testimony, that he had yet another meeting with boyar-about-town Sergey Kislyak. In other words, there appears to be mounting evidence that the Attorney General of the United States lied to Congress, which used to be a big deal.

Let's see. Have I missed anything?

Oh yeah, imported nuisance Nigel Farage seems to be on the FBI's radar, which indicates that the investigation is going international with an eye toward tracing the connections between the Russian ratfcking, the role of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and various rightwing candidates of many lands.

And the counterattack is beginning to take shape in the House of Representatives, courtesy of Congressman Devin Nunes, the allegedly recused chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Just as the news broke Wednesday that James Comey indeed would be testifying in the Senate about his dealings with the president* on all these matters, it also was revealed that Nunes, acting alone on his authority as chairman, had issued subpoenas related to the "unmasking" of Americans caught up in surveillance during the Obama administration. From McClatchy:

On Wednesday, various news outlets reported that the intelligence committee had subpoenaed three former Obama administration officials to address Nunes' allegations. The reports identified the three as former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, former National Security Adviser Susan Rice and former CIA Director John Brennan. But House Intelligence committee staff members would not confirm the reports, and one said whatever subpoenas might have been issued were not part of the committee's Russia probe and had not been approved by the Democrats on the committee. "If the reports are accurate, subpoenas related to the 'unmasking' issue would have been sent by Chairman Nunes acting separately from the committee's Russia investigation," the senior aide wrote in an email. "This action would have been taken without the minority's agreement. Any prior requests for information would have been undertaken without the minority's knowledge."

It's fairly obvious that this "unmasking" business is going to be the primary mode of distraction employed by the Republicans in various congressional hearings to draw attention away from the slow dance this administration has been doing with the folks in Moscow. (I think they subpoenaed Susan Rice out of pure conditioned reflex at this point.) But the general scope of the disaster that is gathering speed in the direction of the White House is becoming clearer. There is virtually nobody in the Trump inner circle who is not compromised in some way by the connections the campaign had with the oligarchs and kleptocrats, and now that seems to be spreading into the Cabinet as well.

The corruption is systemic. What worries me is that it goes in so many directions at this point that the outrage may lose its focus on the simple fact that very effective means were employed to place in the White House an unqualified and vulgar talking yam for the specific purpose of hog-tying the government of the United States. That's the poisonous tree. The rest is all the fruit of it.

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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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