The Guardian view of Trump’s Russia links: a lot to go at | Editorial

Why days before the presidential election did the FBI announce it was reopening an investigation into Hillary Clinton - when it was silent about its probe into Mr Trump's Russia ties?

When the president's own staff turn up in Washington to publicly rebut his accusations that he had been wiretapped by his predecessor, it's not good news for the White House. Yet the longer the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, and Mike Rogers of the National Security Agency appeared in front of a committee of Congress, the worse it got. Since last July, Mr Comey said, the president's campaign has been investigated for colluding with Russia to influence the 2016 election. Donald Trump's election machine is coating his White House with sewage.

Yet Donald Trump, with the insouciance of a Bourbon monarch, shows no sign of taking any notice of the facts. Nor, it seems, will he retract false claims, nor will he be held accountable for his dissembling. Mr Trump is prepared to carry on in disgrace. He spent the minutes after his own intelligence officers called him out for peddling falsehoods by trying to create a bizarre counter narrative with the @POTUS twitter account that stretched his credibility so far it snapped.