I just watched Rachel Maddow’s opening segment from yesterday and it’s a stunner. Sometimes I get restless as she spins things out with a lot of repetition for emphasis, but not this time.

MSNBC seems not to provide urls for segments, you just have to find the right one and click directly on it, so if you want to watch go to the Maddow show and click on Lifting Russian sanctions key to Trump deal exposed by Cohen. It’s currently at the top.

What’s it about? It’s about why did Flynn and K. T. McFarland lie about talking to Russia about sanctions before Trump took office? Why did they take the risk of perjury when their punishment for talking to Russia wouldn’t have amounted to much?

It’s like this: Trump was working on the Trump Tower Moscow deal, and financing was supposed to come from VTB, a Russian bank which was…sanctioned. Lifting sanctions would make the tower deal work.

There are some surprise details in the story, including one that made me jump the way one jumps at a horror movie.

One of the key points is that Flynn and McFarland were compromised as soon as they lied to Congress and the FBI about those conversations. Russia knew they had lied, so just as with Trump, Russia had that over them.

It’s all so seamy it’s beyond belief.