Washington Post: “A porn star was paid to keep silent about her alleged dalliance years earlier with a presidential candidate, which a judge has agreed was an illegal violation of campaign finance laws.”

“The private emails of Democrats were stolen and published, which prosecutors have said was an illegal intervention into the U.S. political system by foreign operatives.”

“The two crimes were undertaken to help Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016. They led to the indictment or conviction of 13 men, including Trump’s personal attorney. But for nearly four years, Trump has bullied, browbeaten and litigated his way out of efforts to pin down whether he had involvement in or knowledge of the illicit actions that were undertaken to help his presidential campaign.”

First Read has the “indisputable” facts on the Russia investigation:

1. Trump and his campaign asked for Russia’s help in the 2016 presidential race.
2. Trump and his campaign got that help — in a contest decided by fewer than 80,000 votes in three states.
3. Roger Stone lied about his contacts with Russian intelligence and WikiLeaks.
4. The president commuted Stone’s prison sentence, despite White House aides disagreeing with the move.
5. And Stone admitted his objective was protecting Trump.

“Yes, some of the liberal theories about Russia investigation never came to pass (Michael Cohen didn’t travel to Prague; that ‘pee tape’ appears to be fantasy).”

“And, yes, Mueller concluded that his investigation didn’t establish ‘that that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.’ (Though note he said ‘Russian government’ and not intermediaries like WikiLeaks.)”

“But what did happen was a bigger scandal — involving a foreign adversary — than we can remember for any recent administration or major presidential campaign.”

Alan Abramowitz: “Trump campaigned more times in more states than Hillary Clinton in 2016. However, a regression analysis of the 2016 results does not show rallies having a significant impact on that election’s results.”

“Campaigns may derive indirect benefits from rallies, though, such as voter contacts, press coverage, and donations. But there’s not much evidence to show that the number of rallies in a given state had an impact on the results.”

Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale acknowledged that he didn’t vote in the 2016 election, citing absentee ballot complications, CNN reports.

Said Parscale: “In 2016, I was in New York working to elect Donald Trump and encountered a series of problems receiving my absentee ballot from Texas and missed the deadline. Just further proof that vote-by-mail is not the flawless solution Democrats and the media pretend it is.”

“David Bossie and Corey Lewandowski, two key allies and former political advisers to Donald Trump, went to the White House last week to issue him a warning: The president was slipping badly in swing states, and he needed to do something to fix it,” Politico reports.

Roger Stone was in contact with one or more apparently well-connected Israelis at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign, one of whom warned Stone that Trump was “going to be defeated unless we intervene” and promised “we have critical intel,” the Times of Israel reports.

“The exchange between Stone and this Jerusalem-based contact appears in FBI documents made public on Tuesday.”

“The fact that there are warnings like ‘Do not drink’ on bottles of bleach makes me realize that Donald Trump can become president.”

— Ricky Gervais, on Twitter, March 6, 2016.

“The Senate Intelligence Committee reaffirmed its support for the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election with the goal of putting Donald Trump in the Oval Office,” Politico reports.

“Tuesday’s bipartisan report, from a panel chaired by North Carolina Republican Richard Burr, undercuts Trump’s years of efforts to portray allegations of Kremlin assistance to his campaign as a ‘hoax,’ driven by Democrats and a ‘deep state‘ embedded within the government bureaucracy.”

President Trump’s former campaign advisor J.D. Gordon told special counsel Robert Mueller’s team that Trump’s prospective foreign policy team as being run “like a 6th grade student council with no real authority or power” and said that spokeswoman Hope Hicks “lied about contact with Russians,” BuzzFeed News reports.

Gordon also told Mueller’s team that the Trump campaign was “disorganized and chaotic at times” and “believed there were a lot of shenanigans happening at the highest levels.”

President Trump’s campaign is suing the New York Times for libel over an opinion piece that claimed his campaign had an “overarching deal” with Russian President Vladimir Putin to trade election help for a “new pro-Russian foreign policy.”

“The Democratic primary is following a similar trajectory to what Republicans experienced four years ago, when a long-shot candidate with a devoted base gained momentum while his party’s establishment politicians squabbled over who was best suited to take him on,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

Said former Jeb Bush aide Matt Gorman: “Close your eyes: There’s a septuagenarian presidential candidate with a pretty indestructible level of support who is leading in several early states—who am I talking about? Much like Trump, the press and Beltway audiences don’t take seriously his ability to win the nomination and keep waiting breathlessly for that inevitable collapse, and neither is happening any time soon.”

“Hillary Clinton said on Friday in a podcast interview that Sen. Bernie Sanders and his supporters did not do enough to unify the Democratic Party after the prolonged 2016 primary, calling the behavior of his supporters ‘distressing’ and saying it affected the general election,” the New York Times reports.

Said Clinton: “All the way up until the end, a lot of people highly identified with his campaign were urging people to vote third party, urging people not to vote. It had an impact.”

She added: “That cannot happen again. I don’t care who the nominee is. I don’t care. As long as it’s somebody who can win, and as long as it’s somebody who understands politics is the art of addition, not subtraction.”