If any of this is shocking to you, please I implore you to read in full the Mueller Report and the Senate Intel report I linked earlier. These reports are nonpartisan and bipartisan respectively, and were directed by Republicans who were appointed and/or elected by Republicans. Read the raw text without any media filter or paraphrasing, especially the Mueller Report Vol I and the Senate Intel Report on Russian Active Measures Vol. V.

> I think a logical leap which is often made, and which it appears that you may me making, is that ... working with Russia caused Trump to win the election.

I can assure you I'm not under any delusion that this is the cause of Trump winning. I'm not even sure it helped that much. I believe the proximal cause of Hillary's loss was actually the Comey announcement that happened mere days before the election. If you look at the polls, you can see her favorability dropped significantly after that announcement but then started to bounce back (but not quite to the level it was at before the announcement). Given how tight the contest was, and how that announcement visibly affected polling, there's a big question in my mind that had Comey not done that, she might have won.

> Trump and Russia colluded to do what?

Here's what the Mueller report says:

[T]he investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.

It goes on to say:

[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.

So we know why they were engaged in this relationship; Russia didn't want a Clinton presidency, and Trump wanted to be President. While the Mueller report "did not establish" that the Trump campaign "conspired" with Russia to do this, it's important to note that:

1. Conspiracy is a technical legal term, this was always an unlikely scenario and not at all what the mainstream and serious jurists were alleging. It's worth noting that the directive to focus the investigation on "conspiracy" came from Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, who also intoned to Trump privately that he would "land this plane", referring to concluding the Mueller investigation in a light favorable to Trump. When the report was released, it was AG Bill Barr who released the second quote above and withheld the first one from the public, a move that a federal judge wrote lacked "candor".

2. "The investigation did not establish members..." is not the same as "The investigation established members did not...". Most of the media and all of the GOP read the former and pretended it was the latter. This is especially disturbing because the reason the Muller report says it could not establish these facts was in part because witnesses lied, destroyed evidence, and obstructed the investigation, hence the entire second volume of the report (this is why obstruction is a crime on its own, because if you are allowed to obstruct an investigation with impunity, you can get away with almost anything). This is where the Senate report picks up and fills in more details about actual coordination between Trump and Russia via Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort.

> In this scenario, what exactly is Russia doing which is aiding the Trump campaign which any Super PAC would not be able to do?

They hacked the Democratic National Committee and handed the hacked materials over to Wikileaks for distribution. PACS can't do that. Also unlike PACS, the Russian GRU isn't subject to any American campaign finance laws which are in place to provide transparency to the electoral process.

> Trump was, with his message, able to convince a large enough share of the population to take the electoral college, to vote for him. In other words, Trump is the primary reason Trump got elected. Russia at best put a finger on the scale, or added a little bit more fuel to a fire which was already burning.

I'm definitely not going to deny that! Trump is certainly able to convince people to follow him on his own. But that's not what happened so we have to consider everything in context.

For instance, what was Trump's message during the latter part of the campaign? He spent a lot of time talking about "Crooked Hillary" and the primary evidence he had to point to regarding her "crookedness" was "her e-mails". And then what would he do? He would pivot to Wikileaks and talk about how much he loved Wikileaks. He would talk about how much corruption is in the hacked e-mails, when really they were quite banal. Nonetheless, there was a conflation that happened between Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server and the DNCs hacked e-mails. This made "Hillary Clinton's Hacked E-mails" front page news for weeks before the election. A lot of people I know just flat out assumed they were e-mails from her State server and that they revealed massive corruption, without ever reading them or investigating it past a headline or soundbite.

And let's not forget when the first e-mails from John Podesta were released by Wikileaks: just 1 hour after the Trump access Hollywood "pussy grabbing" tape was released by the Washington Post. This provided a nice distraction for everyone who didn't want to confront Trump's on-camera admission of his proclivity to rampantly sexually assault women.

So is that a finger on the scale? Yeah it is. Is anything about this illegal? Some of it, not all of it, and not the worst parts. And even the stuff that is illegal is almost impossible to prove. So there's no criminal case to bring here. More than anything it proves that some laws should be passed to codify some norms.

Honestly, the Trump-Russia issue is pretty moot at this point. I used to worry about what it would mean for future elections. Here, a candidate colluded with a foreign government to circumvent our standard electoral process in order to gain an advantage on his opponent. He then won and leveraged his power to hide what he did, and he got away with it. This just incentivizes the commission of crimes to gain power. Once you gain power, you're beyond prosecution, so why wouldn't you engage in this behavior, when the plus side is becoming the leader of the most powerful and richest nation on Earth?

But back to something you said:

Trump was, with his message, able to convince a large enough share of the population

This is why I am so concerned right now, because you are so right. Trump is able to convince a large portion of the population through his words alone of almost anything. His message right now is that elections are rigged. The DNC did the rigging during the 2020 election and that was in effect a coup against the US government, which he conflates with himself. And people are convinced of that. They are so convinced of that they were happy to assault the Capitol a year ago.

Now it seems like the whole idea of elections is quaint. Campaign finance laws seem quaint. Voting seems quaint. They've figured out they don't need any of that; they even realized they don't need to campaign on a platform. All they need to do is control state elections boards, and just ignore the result of the vote in a few key states. Cause a contested election, and kick it to the House delegations where Republicans are a majority.

Anyway, I'm sorry to give you this wall of text but you kept responding to me so you asked for it :P