Phooey. Just bullshit.

Lucian Truscott goes there.

New Mueller Indictments Prove That Donald Trump is an Illegitimate President

Anybody who gets elected to office in this country with the help of the intelligence agents of a foreign power has been elected illegitimately. 

It’s not a tough call.

Proving that Trump and his friends at Fox have a point when they argue the real purpose of accusations of Russia intentionally influencing the election in his favor is to deny the legitimacy of his presidency.

All which denials are bullshit, of course.

Trump got elected because that's how the people, and the Electoral College, voted.

The voters voted as they were persuaded, and by whom or how does not affect the legitimacy of their choice or of the winner's victory.

Actual hacking, however, is a crime, as is collusion in said crime.

The Duce and his thugs could still go down for something like that, or for cooperation with the Russians in other crimes related to the election, if there were any.

Oh, and winning an election is not stealing an election.

Only falsifying the actual vote count or interfering with the counting process is that, provided it aims at handing a election he would not otherwise win to so and so, and succeeds.

It has been alleged that the Supreme Court's intervention regarding recounts in Florida during the election of 2000 was unconstitutional and intended to hand an otherwise unlikely victory to GW Bush.

If the allegation is true that intervention would count as stealing an election.

It’s all right there in the indictment — day by day, hack by hack, theft by theft — how agents of the Russian intelligence service, the GRU, set out in the spring of 2016 to steal the election for Donald Trump. 

When you track the actions taken by Russian intelligence in the indictment with statements made by Trump and actions taken on his behalf by members of his campaign, the picture is as clear as an iPhone photo. 

Agents of the Russian government coordinated with members of the Trump campaign and took cues from Trump himself in order to influence the election of 2016.

In announcing the indictment, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein may have refused to point to a victim of the Russians’ crimes other than to say it was America itself, but the intent of the Russians was clear. 

They took active measures over a period of at least nine months to aid the campaign of Donald Trump and to damage the campaign of Hillary Clinton. 

They stole the election for Donald Trump, and he helped them do it.

Not every liberal wants to take that Truscott line.

Chris Cillizza

In Trump's mind, any talk of Russian interference in the election is an attempt to undermine the "brilliant campaign" (his words) he ran in 2016 and somehow invalidate his victory. 

Why else would Trump launch into an extended riff about his Electoral College margin in front of the President of Russia and almost two years removed from that election? 

What does Putin care how many electoral votes Trump won? 

And what difference does it makes anyway? 

Trump is President. 

He won. 

The end.

Conservative pundit Brit Hume summed up Trump's remarkable blindness to anything beyond his own nose in this tweet: 

"Because Trump is unable to see past himself, he sees the Russia meddling investigation as only about him and the collusion claim, and thus calls it a witch hunt. 

"But the investigations are much more about what Russia did, as the House and Senate reports long since established."

Not everything in the world is about Donald Trump.

Attempting to get to the bottom of the meddling of a foreign power in a US presidential election isn't about trying to hurt Trump. 

It's way, way, way bigger than that. 

It's about trying to protect democracy from those who would tear it down from the inside out. 

A President who can't or won't see that is someone who is actively dangerous not only to the United States but to the world.