Timothy O’Brien: “As President Trump and his lawyers turn toward the new year, they’ll have to contend with a legal narrative that’s taken fuller shape through a flurry of court filings and news reports that began landing about three weeks ago and extended through Friday afternoon: Members of Trump’s presidential campaign — and possibly ‘Individual 1’ himself — may have orchestrated a number of criminal conspiracies that took root before and during the 2016 presidential campaign, continued after Trump won the election, and have tainted the White House’s policies and torn at its operations ever since.”

“The breadth of investigations is so sweeping — as many on social media and reporters with the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and Bloomberg News have already noted — that few of the worlds Trump inhabits have escaped prosecutors’ attention. The Trump Organization, the Trump Foundation, the Trump family, the Trump campaign, the Trump transition, the Trump inauguration, and the Trump White House are all being probed for wrongdoing.”

Jonathan Chait: “In an interview yesterday, George Stephanopoulos asked President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani if Roger Stone ever gave Trump a ‘heads-up’ about forthcoming WikiLeaks email publications. ‘No, he didn’t, no,’ he replied. But then Giuliani seemed to reconsider his certitude almost immediately. He blinked, and then softened his denial — ‘I don’t believe so’ — before immediately transitioning into a conditional defense of the very charge he had been asked to deny: ‘But again, if Roger Stone gave anybody a heads-up about WikiLeaks’ leaks, that’s not a crime. It would be like giving him a heads-up that the Times is going to print something. One the — the crime, this is why this thing is so weird, strange. The crime is conspiracy to hack; collusion is not a crime; it doesn’t exist.'”

“If you understand the facts and the law in this case, this much should be clear: Trump is almost certainly guilty of both collusion and a crime. And Giuliani’s backpedalling defense reveals that he is no longer confident Trump’s denials will hold.”

Garrett Graff: “After three weeks of back-to-back-to-back-to-back bombshells by federal prosecutors and special counsel Robert Mueller, it’s increasingly clear that as 2018 winds down, Donald Trump faces a legal assault unlike anything previously seen by any president—a total of at least 17 distinct court cases stemming from at least seven different sets of prosecutors and investigators. (That total does not count any congressional inquiries, nor does it include any other inquiries into other administration officials unrelated to Russia.)”

“While the media has long short-handed Mueller’s probe as the ‘Russia investigation,’ a comprehensive review of the cases unfolding around the president and the question of Russian influence in the 2016 campaign harkens back to another lesson of Watergate: Deep Throat’s dictum, ‘Follow the money.’”