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Both parties cooperated to violate the Constitution. It is so much worse than most will acknowledge to themselves.

Precision will be very important, as will a very detailed timeline. The origins of the surveillance on Trump run way back. At some point, certainly by the time the Steele Dossier was produced and perhaps before, senior IC officials were briefing/leaking the accusations to key people all around DC. This included top media people and senior people on the Hill. So: suppose you were a Republican Senator or Congressman in a need to know position in the fall of 2016 and spring of 2017, from the election into the early days of the Trump administration. Top FBI, DOJ and CIA officials had briefed you that the stories circulating were accurate, that they were verified by the FBI, that allied intelligence services vouched for key elements, and that an active counterintelligence investigation was ongoing. What would your reaction have been?

Would you have leapt to the barricades, the stainless banner of St. Donald of Mar-a-Lago in hand? Probably not. Trump has enough personal baggage to sink the Titanic, and he had gone out of his way to win ugly in the primaries, playing dog at the fire hydrant with any Republican who opposed him on anything. Trump had made himself a very easy target. The conspirators took every advantage of that and kneecapped him long before he took office. Playing John McCain as a stooge was just one of many examples, but it was a powerful ploy as it established an apparently independent source of corroboration laundered through a top Republican Senator. We know now that this was a setup. That wasn't known at the time.

The best two observers in my opinion have been Joe DiGenova and Andrew McCarthy. Both are former federal prosecutors. Both were instinctive institutional defenders of the FBI and DOJ. Through the early stages of this affair, both steadfastly warned Trump supporters to be very careful, because the FBI would certainly have independently verified any information presented to the FISA court or used to predicate any investigation. Drip by drip this certainty eroded away, and inch by inch, DiGenova and McCarthy reversed their opinion. That makes them particularly compelling voices now -- in contrast to the leftist critics of Trump who have learned nothing and simply repeat old lies that have long since been discredited. In judging culpability of various parties to these proceedings, the key question will be "what did he know and when did he know it." The second question will be, "Has he revised his opinion to reflect the staggering new information that has been revealed?"

This will be an incredibly intricate story. Turning it into indictments and ultimately convictions will require juries that will be tasked to absorb a daunting mass of detail and draw accurate conclusions in the face of massive stonewalling and efforts to confuse. And all it will take to kill any prosecution will be a single partisan juror willing to engage in jury nullification. Barr and Durham have a very difficult job ahead of them.