It appears there is at least one branch of the federal government that Donald Trump has been unable to corrupt. So far.

He put loyal toadies who would lie and cheat for him over at the Department of Justice with William Barr, at EPA and Interior with a couple of fossil fuel lobbyists, at the FCC with a Verizon lawyer, at the Department of Education with a billionaire hack who hates public schools, and he even a former defense lobbyist in charge of the Pentagon.

But the intelligence community, or at least people in it, appear to have resisted.

Word that Donald Trump has known for months, and possibly for over a year, that Russia was paying the Taliban for killing American soldiers has rocked Americans.

But the bigger question, yet to be confronted in public, is whether Trump will use this as an opportunity to crush our intelligence services the way he has our agencies responsible for legal, labor, and environmental protections. Whether this could signal the final death of our form of government.

Trump has already begun the process of corrupting America's intelligence agencies.

He moved a hardcore, rightwing Tea Party crackpot from Congress, John Ratcliffe, into the position of Director of National Security after Ratcliffe did such a spectacular job defending Trump's attempted treason with Ukraine during the impeachment hearings.

Ratcliffe, predictably, is saying that Trump didn't know about all this, although multiple sources are reporting that it was included in the Presidential Daily Briefing and that Trump was explicitly informed last year.

The intelligence community is both broad and deep, and it's entirely possible that Trump hasn't had enough time or doesn't have enough toadies in that world to bring it to its knees.

This will get particularly explosive if the intelligence community decides to follow up by offering an answer to the question of why Donald Trump would be OK with Russia doing this, or at least why he would ignore it.

Watch this space.

-Thom