THE PROBLEM WITH A FAMILY BUSINESS BUILT ON CRIMINALITY...:

The potential innocent explanations for Donald Trump's behavior over the last two years have been steadily stripped away, piece by piece. Special counsel Robert Mueller and investigative reporters have uncovered and assembled a picture of a presidential campaign and transition seemingly infected by unprecedented deceit and criminality, and in regular--almost obsequious--contact with America's leading foreign adversary.

A year ago, Lawfare's Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic outlined seven possible scenarios about Trump and Russia, arranged from most innocent to most guilty. Fifth on that list was "Russian Intelligence Actively Penetrated the Trump Campaign--And Trump Knew or Should Have Known," escalating from there to #6 "Kompromat," and topping out at the once unimaginable #7, "The President of the United States is a Russian Agent."

After the latest disclosures, we're steadily into Scenario #5, and can easily imagine #6.

The Cohen and Manafort court documents all provide new details, revelations, and hints of more to come. They're a reminder, also, that Mueller's investigation continues alongside an investigation by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York that clearly alleges that Donald Trump participated in a felony, directing Cohen to violate campaign finance laws to cover up extramarital affairs.

Through his previous indictments against Russian military intelligence and the Russian Internet Research Agency, Mueller has laid out a criminal conspiracy and espionage campaign approved, according to US intelligence, by Vladimir Putin himself. More recently, Mueller has begun to hint at the long arm of that intelligence operation, and how it connects to the core of the Trump campaign itself.

She seemed like the model tenant. A 33-year-old nurse who was living at the Y.W.C.A. in Harlem, she had come to rent a one-bedroom at the still-unfinished Wilshire Apartments in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens. She filled out what the rental agent remembers as a "beautiful application." She did not even want to look at the unit.

There was just one hitch: Maxine Brown was black.

Stanley Leibowitz, the rental agent, talked to his boss, Fred C. Trump.

"I asked him what to do and he says, 'Take the application and put it in a drawer and leave it there,'" Mr. Leibowitz, now 88, recalled in an interview.

It was late 1963 -- just months before President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act -- and the tall, mustachioed Fred Trump was approaching the apex of his building career. He was about to complete the jewel in the crown of his middle-class housing empire: seven 23-story towers, called Trump Village, spread across nearly 40 acres in Coney Island.

He was also grooming his heir. His son Donald, 17, would soon enroll at Fordham University in the Bronx, living at his parents' home in Queens and spending much of his free time touring construction sites in his father's Cadillac, driven by a black chauffeur.

"His father was his idol," Mr. Leibowitz recalled. "Anytime he would come into the building, Donald would be by his side."

Over the next decade, as Donald J. Trump assumed an increasingly prominent role in the business, the company's practice of turning away potential black tenants was painstakingly documented by activists and organizations that viewed equal housing as the next frontier in the civil rights struggle. [...]

Looking back, Mr. Trump's response to the lawsuit can be seen as presaging his handling of subsequent challenges, in business and in politics. Rather than quietly trying to settle -- as another New York developer had done a couple of years earlier -- he turned the lawsuit into a protracted battle, complete with angry denials, character assassination, charges that the government was trying to force him to rent to "welfare recipients" and a $100 million countersuit accusing the Justice Department of defamation.

When it was over, Mr. Trump declared victory, emphasizing that the consent decree he ultimately signed did not include an admission of guilt.

But an investigation by The New York Times -- drawing on decades-old files from the New York City Commission on Human Rights, internal Justice Department records, court documents and interviews with tenants, civil rights activists and prosecutors -- uncovered a long history of racial bias at his family's properties, in New York and beyond.

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