“Trump has almost certainly engaged in obstruction of justice for the simple reason that there is a lot of justice to obstruct.”

Julian Sanchez recently had a good post arguing that the focus on whether the FBI’s investigation will produce evidence of active collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian state during the election is misplaced:

It therefore seems like a grave error to talk as though the two possible outcomes are that the FBI’s investigation—or that of a special counsel, if that’s the direction this ends up going—either finds clear evidence of knowing collusion or turns up nothing much worth talking about. The more we focus obsessively on that first unlikely alternative, the easier it becomes to sweep any other significant findings under the rug once the investigation concludes, by limiting public disclosure of those findings to a terse answer to the binary question of collusion. Probably James Comey would have been difficult to bully into complicity in such a whitewash, but he’s gone now, and the more the public is convinced that’s the only question worth answering, the easier his successor will find it to play ball.

And one of these significant findings is likely to be massive corruption on the part of Trump and his associates:

A week ago, it appeared that the probe would center around the activities of a handful of figures who are now marginal within Trumpworld: former campaign manager Paul Manafort, foreign policy adviser Carter Page, and deposed National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. That has changed. The Washington Post reported Friday that investigators have identified a current White House official as a person of interest in its financial probe. (The story hinted, and New York Magazine contributor Yashar Ali confirmed, that the person is Jared Kushner.)

Ominously for Trump, the Post reports that the FBI is “determining whether any financial crimes were committed by people close to the president.” While Kushner’s public persona differs wildly from that of the president in the functioning of his real-estate work, he is a kind of mini Trump. Inheriting an empire from his father, he has operated in gray areas of the world economy and positioned himself to gain handsomely from Trump’s election. Kushner has met with the head of a Russian bank functionally controlled by Vladimir Putin. He appears to be eager to use his proximity to Trump to make a buck; his family business is exploiting the familial connection to sell visas in China. Trump himself has a long, nontransparent history of business dealings with organs of the Russian state. (Last week, The Wall Street Journal dug up another case.)

All this implies that the probe is scrutinizing the financial aspects of Trump’s business, which is a family operation. While some Trump advisers opposed the firing of Comey, Kushner reportedly advocated for it. That fact may seem strange if one thinks of Kushner as a voice of pragmatism. But it is easier to understand if you think of him as a figure sitting near the heart of a financial scandal, who harbors a strong interest in suppressing the investigation.

An investigation can find an awful lot of damaging things about the Trump administration without finding smoking gun evidence of willful collusion. And almost certainly will.