The President of the United States wakes each day, it seems, to another nightmarish crisis and addresses it as if in a state of frenzied denial. When faced with the hideous reality of yet another gun massacre, this time in Parkland, Florida, he dares not mention guns. (The N.R.A., which spent thirty-one million dollars to help get him elected, would not approve.) When faced with the testimonies of two women accusing his aide Rob Porter of beating them, he applauds the man’s fine work, wishes him a great career, and, only after days of delay, woodenly declares himself “totally opposed” to domestic violence.

For well over a year, Donald Trump has dodged the subject of Russian interference in the 2016 election and potential charges of collusion and obstruction of justice. It’s all “phony,” a “hoax,” “fake news,” a “witch hunt.” Last year, during a multilateral summit in Vietnam, Trump met briefly with Vladimir Putin and then told reporters that he had asked the Russian President about election meddling. Not to worry, he told reporters: “Every time he sees me, he says, ‘I didn’t do that.’ And I believe, I really believe, that when he tells me that, he means it.”

Trump cannot really accept what his own intelligence leaders tell him about the election; he even directed his C.I.A. director to meet with a former operative turned conspiracy theorist who thought that the hack of the Democratic National Committee was an “inside job.” Only rarely, and begrudgingly, has Trump acknowledged Russian hacking, and, when he does, he hastens to emphasize its triviality, its meaninglessness.

The special counsel, Robert Mueller, has now charged thirteen Russian nationals and three Russian organizations with meddling in the election. Rod Rosenstein, Trump’s Deputy Attorney General, told reporters on Friday that the people and entities charged intended “to promote discord in the United States and undermine public confidence in democracy.” The indictment focusses on the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm based in St. Petersburg, Russia, which, beginning in 2014, allegedly carried out an expensive and intricate influence operation concentrated on highly contested battleground states, including Florida, Virginia, and Colorado. Some of the defendants, it said, posed as Americans and communicated with “unwitting individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities.”

These indictments could, at least for the moment, allow Trump to believe that Mueller will not discover any knowing collusion in the President’s campaign. Nor do they demonstrate that Putin himself directed the operation.

And yet the indictments are unlikely to ease Trump’s sense of political embattlement even inside his own Administration. Earlier this week, a group of intelligence chiefs, including the director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats; the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray; and the C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo—all Trump Administration appointees—told a Senate panel that they were in accord with the findings of January, 2017, when the intelligence community asserted that Russia had meddled in the 2016 elections and did so to the detriment of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

As Coats told the senators, “There should be no doubt that Russia perceives its past efforts as successful and views the 2018 midterm elections as a potential target for Russian influence operations.” The F.B.I. director added that President Trump had not directly ordered them to take measures to prevent meddling in the midterms.

Mueller’s indictment is in synch with the findings of the intelligence community—a collection of immense bureaucracies that Trump and his supporters have routinely denounced as a conspiratorial and establishmentarian “deep state” intent on undermining his Presidency. Trump has repeatedly expressed his fury with leaders of the C.I.A., the F.B.I., and the Justice Department, a toxic dynamic that seems, by now, more a constant state of affairs than a matter of fleeting temper.

The indictment bluntly states that the intent of the Russian operation was to damage the Democratic candidate. “Defendants’ operations included supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump (‘Trump campaign’) and disparaging Hillary Clinton,” it said. “Defendants made various expenditures to carry out these activities, including buying political advertisements on social media in the names of U.S. persons and entities.” The indictment also says that the operatives, posing as Americans, fraudulently helped to stage political rallies to undermine Trump’s Republican foes Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio; to boost Clinton’s Democratic rival, Bernie Sanders; to promote the notion of “voter fraud” in the Democratic Party (a well-worn Trump meme); and to encourage minorities not to vote or to vote for a third-party candidate, particularly Jill Stein, of the Green Party. In general, the operations, reminiscent of the “active measures” of the Soviet and Russian security services, as well as Western intelligence agencies, during the Cold War, were meant to arouse the “political intensity” of the country and tilt the election. The indictment refers to “information warfare” as the main weapon trained on the ballot. One of the many political advertisements created and distributed by the operation read, “Hillary is Satan, and her crimes and lies had proved just how evil she is.”

Because the Russians named are almost certainly not going to be extradited to the United States, it is uncertain how much more we will learn about their activities. The indictment will likely impinge on their ability to travel.

Leading figures in the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign declared the indictments a serious problem for the Trump Administration. “This is a direct rebuke of the President’s ‘witch hunt’ narrative, that it was all invented from the start,” Jake Sullivan, one of Clinton’s closest policy and campaign advisers, told me. “These are meticulous criminal indictments showing that there was a campaign of interference to support Trump and to hurt Hillary. This also establishes a predicate crime, a criminal conspiracy—and that means that, if there were U.S. persons, or U.S. persons connected to Trump, involved, then they will be criminally exposed. What Mueller has done is to establish a criminal conspiracy. And, if Americans were party to this, they could be charged.”

It is not at all likely that these indictments will put an end to Mueller’s investigation. Nor do they nail down a case for either collusion by members of Trump’s circle or obstruction of justice by the President. Rather, they seem another step in an extended process.

“I read it as a tactical move on his part saying, ‘This was not a witch hunt. This was real,’ and to create the conditions to move into the next phase,” Sullivan told me, referring to Mueller. “It sets up an inquiry into what, if any, Americans were involved. Maybe the Russians just had ‘useful’ tools, and any Americans were unwitting. But I believe that Mueller will keep pursuing this line of inquiry. He’s not done. They are going to dig into these entities and individuals, and see how many more they can identify, and explore their methods and finances and communications to see if this connects to anyone in the United States.”

It is also unclear to what degree Mueller is investigating Trump’s economic ties to Russian banks or individuals.

Trump’s reaction to the indictments was to tweet that the Russian operation began in 2014, “long before” he announced his candidacy. “The results of the election were not impacted,” he wrote. “The Trump campaign did nothing wrong—no collusion!”

Michael McFaul, the U.S. Ambassador to Russia under President Obama, wrote on Twitter that Trump’s statement was “shockingly weak. Putin attacked America and no pushback whatsoever. Why?”

The Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, who has become a mostly obedient ally of Trump’s, was far less defensive than the President, saying, “These Russians engaged in a sinister and systematic attack on our political system. It was a conspiracy to subvert the process and take aim at democracy itself.” Unlike Trump, he said that the indictment “underscores why we need to follow the facts and work to protect the integrity of future elections.” Trump, in past fits of rage, has considered seriously, and loudly, the possibility of firing Mueller and Rosenstein.

Stephen Sestanovich, a foreign-policy official and Russian expert in both the Reagan and Clinton Administrations, told me that until now he had been “unconvinced that Putin ordered all of this.” He was struck by the presence in the indictment of Yevgeny Prigozhin, a wealthy citizen of St. Petersburg, who served nine years in prison for robbery, opened a sausage stand, expanded to restaurants, and eventually grew close to one of his patrons—so much so that he is known locally as “Putin’s cook.”
Prigozhin, the indictment reads, controls the Internet Research Agency, which was the source of many of the scabrous and undermining posts aimed at the Clinton campaign. The Times reported that Facebook discovered that the I.R.A. had posted eighty thousand pieces of content that “reached more the 126 million Americans.” Prigozhin, who is subject to American economic sanctions, reacted to the indictment by telling the Russian news agency Ria Novosti, “The Americans are very impressionable people; they see what they want to see.”

Sestanovich, however, saw it another way—as a clear set of criminal charges from a respected investigator, the former F.B.I. director Mueller, saying that someone in Putin’s circle of old St. Petersburg allies and cronies may have had a strong hand in trying to influence the outcome of the Presidential election, be it at Putin’s direct order or not.

“There can be collusion without Putin’s direction,” Sestanovich said. Say a Trump surrogate gets a call from sketchy Russian hackers. “Does he turn them down? No. So a lot of this can go on without it being a whole comprehensive Putin strategy. But once you have ‘Putin’s chef’ involved, I am suddenly thinking, Wow. I don’t think the chef has his own foreign policy.”