A sizable chunk of the political coverage of the Donald   Trump   "presidency" consisted of stories about Donald   Trump   either breaking laws or demanding other people break laws, with an implicit understanding by all concerned that this was just something   Trump   and his endless supply of toadies did and that nobody intended to do a damn thing about it. Treasonboy has been out of office for nearly two years now, but the hits keep coming.

This time, it's   a   New York Times   story in which onetime   Trump   Chief of Staff John Kelly told the   Times   that, oh, yeah,   Trump   was trying to use the Department of Justice and Internal Revenue Service to do crimes all the time! No question about it! Kelly, being a fine upstanding citizen who's all about the Constitution and not doing crimes, rebuffed him over and over, but that never stopped   Trump   from demanding he do crimes! Heck, the guy was a veritable advent calendar of new crime requests! Anytime somebody in Washington, D.C., or elsewhere pissed Donald off, he'd have to talk Donald down from doing the crimes!

Oh, and after Kelly left, the crimes appear to have actually happened, because every time   Trump   fired someone, he'd replace him with someone he thought would be more willing to do crimes. For Kelly's post,   Trump   would go on to choose House Freedom Caucus crime-likers Mick Mulvaney and, later, Mark Meadows (go figure), which was a pretty bold admission from all sides that if you're a high-level Republican attempting to do crimes, then picking pretty much anyone out of the Freedom Caucus will be your best and most efficient path forward.

This is our lives now. Forever, apparently. An unending stream of top-level Republicans freely admitting to the press that Donald   Trump   was absolutely trying to do very specific crimes all the damn day long, both before and after being scraped out of the White House with a stick, and no matter how many times it happened, everyone stayed quiet about it and concerned themselves mainly with making sure they personally couldn't be tagged with the crimes if and when somebody else decided to do them.

Or, as it is more commonly known, the Jim Jordan gambit.

At issue is the new claim from Donald   Trump   that he, as "president," used the Department of Justice and Internal Revenue Service to help Florida Republican Ron DeSantis win the state's governorship in 2018. As always, it is unclear what Treasonboy is talking about, and there's a better than 80% chance he's just lying through his coup-attempting teeth, because Donald   Trump   lies about everything, all the time. It did, however, prompt   Trump 's White House chief of staff at the time, John Kelly, to inform   The Times   that he wasn't aware of any such effort.

But, Kelly now tells   The Times ,   Trump   did   ask him to use those two government agencies to investigate or harass many of   Trump 's self-declared political enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey, former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, former CIA Director John Brennan, two FBI employees   Trump   targeted for their involvement in the probe of Russian election manipulation, and others.

Kelly says he repeatedly refused, warning   Trump   that using government investigations to target political enemies was not just "inappropriate" but "illegal," only to have   Trump   return to the topic time and time again. But after Kelly left, James Comey and Andrew McCabe   did   find themselves targets of intensive IRS audits. The IRS insists that those audits, among the most invasive and expensive types of audits the IRS is able to bring to bear, were random coincidences.

What are the odds of either man being targeted by random chance?

"Out of the 153 million returns filed for the year Mr. Comey was audited, only 5,000 tax returns were targeted for the audit. For the year Mr. McCabe was audited, 154 million people filed returns and 8,000 were selected for the audit," reports   The Times , and that gives us our answer. The odds that James Comey was "randomly" selected by the IRS for hyper-thorough auditing is 0.0033%; for McCabe, it is 0.0052%.

Even presuming   Trump   regularly demanded audits of, say, all 50 of his most hated enemies, the odds of any one of them "randomly" landing in the IRS' audit crosshairs is roughly, what? 1 in 50,000? For   both   Trump 's most-hated FBI director and his direct most-hated subordinate to land on that same square, purely as coincidence?

Trump   is either one of the luckiest ratbastards on the planet, or multiple somebodies in his chain of command were willing to go forward with the exact crimes Kelly says   Trump   was obsessed with committing during Kelly's tenure. And a man who can bankrupt a casino isn't exactly swimming in that kind of luck.

This is, no matter how many times the major papers dump it on us, Not Normal. It is not normal for countless members of an administration, past or present, to lazily mention to the press that a sitting president was constantly pressing his subordinates to commit crimes. It is not normal for nearly every sloughed-off member of an administration to insist, to the press, that the creature they worked for was forever ignorant about his oath of office, the constraints on the office, what he was supposed to be doing, what he was supposed to be paying attention to, or indeed anything that wasn't delivered with his name or a picture of his own face littering the pages to keep his meager attention.

It is not normal for   any   democracy to have a leader who is constantly attempting to Do Crimes so that he can get back at people who have insulted or exposed him. Hiding classified national security documents in a private golf resort while insisting to the government that he doesn't have them, and if he does, they're his own property anyway: not normal. Attempting a coup for the sole reason of being inordinately butt-hurt: not normal.

You are not at fault for wondering why an entire national party is and was willing to directly enable criminal actions by their leader, or, failing that, covering them up, or failing that, at least doing the would-be criminal the favor of ignoring his attempts at crime so that if the crime happened elsewhere than at least they personally.

Kelly's new information, delivered long after it would have done a plausible amount of good, is that the   Trump   enemies who find themselves targeted by the IRS were, in fact, the   Trump   enemies   Trump   was most obsessed with unleashing the IRS upon, back when he had the power to do so. This news, coupled with the extreme implausibility of   Trump 's targets being subject to such attention by random chance, rather strongly suggests that somebody in   Trump 's pre-violent-coup orbit accommodated his White House demands to do crimes.

We might presume it's one of the people   Trump   specifically hired on for their willingness to commit crimes, but that would be rude.

We might presume it somehow involves Mark Freaking Meadows, who wouldn't let even an attempted overthrow of the government tarnish his devotion to ignoring Republican criminal acts, and that would also be rude. But we'll do it anyway, because when you're asking who in   Trump 's orbit would be most likely to help him do crimes, "ex-House Republican plucked from the Freedom Caucus" is always, always going to be a good bet. That's a resume that fairly screams, "I will help you do crimes."