First and foremost, positing that the president and Congress are simply too INEPT to defend against highly effective Russian attacks on democracy itself (and hardly in the US alone) is no more reassuring than believing them complicit. It is the same old Trump conundrum:

Is he disqualified to serve the nation because a traitor, or "merely" because incompetent? The question badly misses the existential point.

That aside, it defies plausibility (and Occams more famous razor) to believe a US general staff officer intimately involved in the Cold War most of his life would believe it ethical or even acceptable, much less patriotic, to repeatedly call the Russian Ambassador while working on a presidential campaign with an offer to drop US sanctions imposed precisely because Russia was violently and subversively trying to put the Warsaw Pact band back together. Though I concede it was staggeringly stupid such an individual never once considered US intelligence agencies might be tapping the Russian Ambassadors phone (especially since it is said to be "an open secret in Washington" that the "Russian Ambassador to the US" is really just Russias chief SPYMASTER in the US.)

Kushner contacting the Russian government to establish secret "back channel" communications without the CIAs knowledge is equally hard to attribute to what would have to be a drooling idiot level of incompetence.

Or the current AG repeatedly meeting with the Russian Ambassador at the Convention that nominated Trump, yet testifying to Congress that he NEVER did so, then "amending" his statements to retroactively recall each meeting, but only each time one of them was "recalled for him." I mean, sure, he meets lots of people, especially during a campaign, so maybe I could believe he initially forgot meeting the ambassador at all, or even a second meeting—but after the SECOND time Congress pointed out that, yeah, you actually did meet him in this place on this date, I must believe he would have been racking his brain and documentary records to remind himself of any and all other meetings he might have forgotten. I certainly would if I had been foolish enough to hang out with foreign ambassadors while I was a senior member of a presidential campaign, and I neither graduated from the US Military Academy nor hold a Juris Doctor degree, like Sessions.'

I actually CAN believe Trump Jr. was stupid enough to believe it was not only acceptable to get dirt on Hillary directly from a hostile Russian government, but not unwise to document it with exultant emails. However, I am also familiar with the phrase "ignorance of the law is no excuse" (and am certain Attorney General Sessions is.)

Then there is Manafort: Replacing "Donald Trump" with "Viktor Yanukovych" and "Hillary Clinton" with "Yulia Tymoshenko" makes the campaign Manafort ran for Putin in 2016 indistinguishable from the one he ran for Putin in 2010. The only practical difference is that the US did not live under Soviet domination for centuries, so shouting, "Lock her up, lock her up, lock her up...!" at campaign rallies only succeeded in putting Tymoshenko in prison.

Are you familiar with the phrase "Pattern of behavior"? Kind of important in obstruction of justice investigations. So far the main difference between Trumps and the one that brought down his mentors mentor Nixon is that, while the Plumbers DID steal documents from the DNC to rig an election, they were working directly for CREEP, not the KGB—oh, sorry, "the FSB," because the Soviet spy agency that recruited Putin is TOTALLY DIFFERENT from the one he ran before "elected" to run all of Russia in what KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko claimed was an "FSB" coup (though he ceased claiming that soon after the polonium poisoning that killed him in London.)

This is WAY bigger than Dems vs. Republicans: We and the EU remain "the last best hope for democracy," because if we go down thanks to Trump, Le Pen and Brexit our "choices" and that of everyone else on Earth will be reduced to Putins police state, the PLAs police state or some fundamentalist mullahs police state.