In any healthy democracy, this would have been seen as a scandal exposing signs of corruption and would have likely resulted in the dissolution of the government and early election.

But the US is not a healthy democracy.

Mine haven’t. I pulled my money out a month ago when I saw that the new Trump presidency wasn’t going to be like the first one.

This reminds me of that quote from Mass Effect:

“This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight! Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class Dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means: Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space! (…) I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty! Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going 'till it hits something! That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someone’s day, somewhere and sometime!”