Washington scandals can metastasize in the most unexpected ways. The classic example of this is the long-running Whitewater investigation in the nineteen-nineties, which burbled on for years during Bill Clinton’s White House tenure, generating endless plots and subplots before eventually morphing into the Starr investigation, which led to Clinton’s 1998 impeachment on charges that he had lied under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. By the time the probe threatened to take down Clinton’s Presidency, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the original Whitewater allegations concerning the terms of a real-estate investment in Arkansas in the early years of his political career.

So let’s stipulate that we don’t yet know the ending of the controversy surrounding Donald Trump’s ties to

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