Caveats: It was third- or fourth-hand, and I can't really get into the specifics of how/whom I heard this from. Feel free to believe as little or as much of it as you like, but you have my word - should that mean anything to you - that what's below is (or was) the honest, if composite, views of senior members of the grown-up wing of the administration.

- They generally didn't feel that there was going to be anything truly damaging on the collusion angle. The Don Jr. meeting may have been as bad as that got. There wasn't (according to them) any concerted collusion effort, at least not in a direct way that would leave hard evidence. More like - and this is my speculation - the wink-wink, once we get in we'll see what we can do about sanctions, way. Nothing that would approach bringing down a presidency.

- They were, however, quite worried about Mueller looking into Trump's finances, because there was a "there" there, particularly as it pertained to Russia. I think we're seeing this playing out. Their read was that Trump did, in fact, have significant debts to Russian interests, which I took to mean oligarchs/banks/Putin cronies, all of which are basically the same thing. Plus some (maybe most) of the debt may have been hidden through laundering and/or other shady practices that could potentially be unraveled. That was the area where these people seemed to feel there was legitimate potential exposure for Trump and the White House.

- Neither here nor there, but they believed that the sex stuff in the dossier was largely true. They weren't worried about it in the grand scheme because it's not illegal, and Trump certainly doesn't embarrass easily, but he's pretty strongly and continuously denied it, which is another way you know it's true. (Kidding! But not really.)

Given the second point, that's my guess as to why Trump has seemed particularly unhinged (even by his standards) ever since it came out that Mueller was looking into his past business dealings, and could also get access to his tax returns. Why Trump seemed surprised by this is anyone's guess, but I'm trying to spend less time these days analyzing his thought process as if there's some coherent pattern to be found.

There's also Preet Bharara's case that was looking into DB's alleged ties to Russian money laundering. Bharara, of course, got canned by Trump, and I think it's a pretty reasonable conclusion that this was an effort to short-circuit that and other Trump-related cases. I have no proof of that, but I'm not Bob Mueller, and I don't have his mandate or resources.

Now maybe today they'd be more worried about obstruction. This was a few months back. But they were already very worried about the financial angle, and this was before stories came out about that and Trump went nuts.
[Post edited by Fuzzy Dunlop at 12/06/2017 09:11AM]