Timothy Snyder is a brilliant young historian who has consented to an interview on a podcast to which I’ve been listening.

He is an admitted anti-Trumpkin. He thinks badly of the president of the United States, as does the interviewer, Sam Harris.

Snyder has written a book, “The Road to Tyranny,” which is the subject of the podcast interview.

His interview is quite lengthy. If you have a good bit of time, I encourage you to listen to it here. I doubt those of you who support the president would want to hear what this fellow has to say. Still, take a listen anyway.

He offers up a lot of theories about current trends and how they relate to where we’ve gone as a nation and what has happened in other places around the world. And, yes, there are plenty of Hitler references.

For this blog post, I want to focus on a tiny snippet of what Snyder said about the investigation into “the Russia thing” by special counsel Robert Mueller, who is examining whether the Trump presidential campaign “colluded” with Russian government spooks seeking to undermine the 2016 election.

Professor Snyder doesn’t quite get why the pro-Trump crowd opposes the probe Mueller is leading. Indeed, why do they? As Snyder points out, if Mueller’s investigation reveals nothing illegal occurred, if it produces a clean bill of political health for Donald Trump, then all that’s left is that “we have an intelligence problem.” The Russians hacked into our democratic process and our intelligence community was unable to detect it and prevent it.

The flip side, of course, is that Mueller’s legal team might uncover something else.

Wherever it goes, the special counsel’s investigation should proceed. We are bound to learn something from it.