John Durham testified before the House Judiciary Committee, and admitted he didn’t know about several elements of the Trump campaign colluding with Russia: releasing stolen email through cutouts, Trump negotiating a tower deal, Manafort and Kilimnik.

On the other side, a possible point of contact might be Konstantin Kilimnik, who the FBI believes has ties to Russian intelligence. A former employee of Manafort’s firm, Kilimnik was sometimes described as “Manafort’s Manafort,” while Manafort reportedly called him “my Russian brain.” A poorly redacted court filing from Mueller’s team inadvertently revealed that Manafort gave Kilimnik detailed polling information during the campaign and discussed a Ukrainian peace plan, then lied about both to Mueller, even when he was supposedly cooperating. Mueller charged Kilimnik with conspiracy to obstruct justice and obstruction of justice for allegedly attempting witness tampering during the Manafort investigation.

When I emailed Griffin again after the Capitol attack, he hadn’t changed his mind. “Trump is far too pathologically incoherent and intellectually challenged to be a fascist, and suffers from both Attention Deficiency Disorder, lack of self-knowledge, capacity for denial, narcissism and sheer ignorance and lack of either culture or education to a degree that precludes the Machiavellian intelligence and voracious curiosity about and knowledge about contemporary history and politics needed to seize power in the manner of Mussolini and Hitler,” Griffin wrote back.

Stanley Payne, a University of Wisconsin historian of Spain and author of A History of Fascism 1914-1945, agrees that Trump’s lack of coherent revolutionary fervor makes him fall short of fascism. “Never founded a new fascist party, never embraced a coherent new revolutionary ideology, never announced a radical new doctrine but introduced a noninterventionist foreign military policy,” Payne wrote to me in an email. “Not even a poor man’s fascist. Ever an incoherent nationalist-populist with sometimes destructive tendencies.”

If Hillary Clinton’s emails mattered so much, why shouldn’t Ivanka’s?

"That's not the correct way to say it," Mueller said. "We did not reach a determination as to whether the president committed a crime."

That statement was more in line with his report, and with his earlier opening statement to the Judiciary Committee, where he said, "Based on Justice Department policy and principles of fairness, we decided we would not make a determination as to whether the President committed a crime. That was our decision then and it remains our decision today."

Carlos del Rio, executive associate dean at the Emory School of Medicine, told POLITICO the CDC guidelines do not make sense because individuals who have been in close contact with a confirmed case of Covid-19 for at least 15 minutes could potentially be infected and should be tested.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo slammed the change as “political propaganda.” Officials in several other states, including California, Connecticut and Washington, said Wednesday that they would not alter their testing approach to match the new CDC guidelines.

"Suggesting that people without symptoms, who have known exposure to COVID-positive individuals, do not need testing is a recipe for community spread and more spikes in coronavirus," American Medical Association President Susan Bailey said.

The abrupt — and unannounced — changes have already intensified scrutiny of the CDC's independence, and the administration's broader coronavirus response ahead of the November election.

"The President of the United States is sabotaging a basic service that hundreds of millions of people rely upon, cutting a critical lifeline for rural economies and for delivery of medicines, because he wants to deprive Americans of their fundamental right to vote safely during the most catastrophic public health crisis in over 100 years," Andrew Bates, a spokesperson for Joe Biden's campaign, said in a statement reacting to Trump's comments.

A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Donald Trump meets many criteria in a historian's checklist of what defines a fascist, and he echoes a wave of extremist movements in some European countries.

The company says it was essential to President Trump's victory, but both Trump and other former clients are downplaying the role of its trademark psychological profiling.