The corporate media is taking a long time to wake up from its slumber

Here is Jonathan Chait saying fairly succinctly what we know to be true. It is now a confirmed fact that a Russian oligarch -- which ipso facto means a crony of Vladimir Putin -- paid $500,000 to a shell company set up by Donald Trump's bag man, a firm with no employees that had no apparent function other than making secret payments on Trump's behalf. We have learned this thanks to the lawyer for a porn star who received one such payment. (Really. We are talking about the president of the United States here.) Chait notes:

For all the speculation about the existence of the pee tape, the latest revelations prove what is tantamount to the same thing. Russia could leverage the president and his fixer — who, recall, hand-delivered a pro-Russian “peace plan” with Ukraine to Trump’s national-security adviser in January 2017 — by threatening to expose secrets they were desperate to keep hidden. Whether those secrets were limited to legally questionable payments, or included knowledge of sexual affairs, is a question of degree but not of kind.

 Chait goes on to tell the sordid tale of the chair of the House Intelligence Committee making every effort to undermine and obstruct the investigation, including trying to expose a secret intelligence source who would likely pay the price of his life:

Think for a moment what this report tells us. The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who enjoys the full backing of his party’s leadership, is willing to risk what his own government describes as the betrayal and potential loss of life of an intelligence source. And officials within this government believe the president would do the same, all in order to obstruct an investigation into the president’s secretive ties to a foreign power. They are acting as though Trump is compromised by Russia, or at the very least, that he cannot be trusted to defend his own country’s security against it. The sordid Russia scandal has already brought some version of a very dark nightmare scenario to life.

This is where we stand. The president is a tool of a foreign adversary, the president's party in congress knows this full well and is trying to protect him rather than expose him, and the corporate media are covering their eyes and plugging up their ears. This is treason.

PS: There are obviously dozens of good reasons to give hundreds of thousands of dollars to Michael Cohen that have nothing to do with Donald Trump. I invite y'all to list them.