Originally posted to Facebook in January 2018.

So the Russia investigation story is now overspilling in so many headlines going in different directions that even I, who reads the news for a couple of hours every day, can now no longer keep up with it all. But if you would like a basic primer on why the Trump administration is burning down, here’s an overview:

1. Russia has been trying to interfere with multiple electoral processes throughout the world, and they interfered in the 2016 US Presidential election to promote Trump using a combination of methods, including cyber attacks, fake news reports, manipulating social media adverting, and using US citizens both knowing and ignorant as foreign intelligence agents.

2. It’s reasonably evident now that Donald Trump, and his family (especially Jared Kushner), and his associates, have been happily money-laundering through their real estate businesses for Russian and other foreign citizens, going back decades.

3. No-one in the Trump family knows anything about politics or good governance and this has made them incredibly susceptible to being used by other much smarter people to commit various crimes and take onto their teams various shady people with highly shady links to foreign powers and businessmen who should never in a million years have been let through the door had anyone so much as bothered to Google them.

4. Whatever Trump’s knowledge of the Russian conspiracy to interfere in the election on his behalf, he definitely knows that one shufty through his tax returns is going to turn up all kinds of highly dodgy stuff and is absolutely determined to try to stop this from happening. Because he has spent his entire life in a family owned business where he can tell anyone to do whatever he wants, he cannot conceive that he can’t just tell federal employees to do whatever he wants.

5. Trump’s efforts to shut up the investigation have been crude, blatant, extensively paper trailed, and would embarrass a mafia Don. Lets be fair to them – he has only been held back from a serious constitutional crisis so far by a string of Republican or Republican-appointed lawyers and staffers immolating their own careers to try to stop him. At some point, they will run out.

6. People are going to jail. The only question is whom and on what charge. Four people have already been indicted and there’s going to be more.

7. It’s fairly unlikely that Donald Trump will actually be prosecuted or indicted while in office, or even once he leaves, whether in 2020 or sooner. For all his disgusting venal self-congratulatory man-baby boorishness, he’s the President of the United States of America and American patriots fetishise that office and try to honour the people who hold it, however unworthy. But if he does get indicted, it’ll be for money-laundering and not for obstruction of justice.

8. I’d put his chances of being impeached though at about 50-50. Ultimately this a political move that to succeed would require an atmosphere of bipartisanship that does not currently exist, but might do after a catastrophic mid-term for the Republican Party.

9. There are four Russia investigations running simultaneously, and they cover the actions and dealings of over 270 people so far. This is not even close to the middle of being done.

10. None of this will have any effect on the willingness of Republican voters to continue to elect people who keep sticking their hands together with the PrittStick.