Calder Walton writes that a key issue remains although Mueller has issued his report: Is Trump an asset of the Kremlin?

Calder Walton, Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy and editor of a three-volume series on espionage, provides context for the FBI's Russia probe

Even taken on its own terms, the Nunes memo does nothing that Trump claims. But it does show us something—with deep ramifications for the intelligence community, the Russia investigation and maybe even the presidency

"...[T]he Trump-Russia scandal has the potential to spark an even more damaging US constitutional crisis than Watergate. Unlike Watergate, it involves a hostile foreign power and its intelligence services. At the same time that Mueller's opening indictments were unveiled yesterday, it was revealed that Russian-backed fake election content had reached a staggering 126 million Americans on Facebook during the 2016 election campaign. The Russia-Trump scandal, Watergate 2.0, is just beginning."

"The issues at stake in this reality TV series of presidential politics can be easily ridiculed—will Trump tweet?—but they are profound. Comey's Congressional testimony goes to the heart of the proper functioning of US democracy, being concerned with checks and balances on the executive branch, and, crucially, whether President Trump obstructed justice by exerting pressure on America's senior law enforcement officer."

"A leader who accesses raw intelligence risks short-circuiting this entire enterprise, bypassing agencies that are supposed to prevent partial assessments. An inevitable risk is that a decision-maker with access to raw data that has not been professionally assessed will look for information that confirms his or her preexisting beliefs. Far from intelligence agencies telling leaders what they do not want to hear, in these circumstances, intelligence risks becoming self-fulfilling sycophancy."