The media branch of "the Resistance" wet its pantsuits last Friday when Robert Mueller released sentencing memos on Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen, the human keys to the dungeon they would like to toss Mr. Trump into. Over in the House of Representatives, incoming Judiciary Committee chair Jerrold Nadler worked himself into a rapture as visions of impeachment lap-danced in his head. Their victory gyrations may prove premature.

The memos themselves were not all they were cracked up to be. Despite Mr. Mueller turning the screws of federal prosecution on them for months on end, neither Manafort or Cohen has composed the narrative the Special Counsel wants, so the memos were, in effect, an attempt to run some high voltage through the screws, to goose out a last-minute change-of-heart in the two patsies. Manafort has been stuffed into solitary confinement and Cohen threatened with forty years of jail time, Their stoicism so far suggests this is not the triumphal climax that the spinners of RussiaGate seek.

Mr. Trump's response to all this has seemed, at best, retiring and ineffectual. He's actually done next to nothing to fight back, besides some juvenile tweets, issued perhaps to alert his antagonists that he's paying attention. Given the lack of evidence for the basic predicate of RussiaGate — that the Trump election campaign "colluded" with Russia — and the abundant evidence of crimes against Mr. Trump by his adversaries in prosecuting this fraud, and the legal machinery silently in motion backstage of RussiaGate — there's a lot of room for the story to flip upside down.