To not make a snippy comment about the media treatment about it because that would be tiring, I'd like to instead draw an imperfect parallel to narcopolitics in Latin America. Kingpins from El Chapo to Escobar were notorious for getting away with just about anything, the former for his tunnel and the latter for actually dropping bombs. For a lot of folks on the other side of the border, perhaps they thought it was something that could never happen here.
But, I think what I see there, what I see here just tend to reinforce something that I believe is vindicated by the rest of history -- politics can be very dirty, and to prematurely label something a conspiracy theory can get in the way of seeing the reality of what happens on the ground. There's a difference between labeling something a conspiracy theory because it feels unthinkable and labeling something a conspiracy theory because it's a stretch to imagine it logistically possible. I have a hope that somehow we can get to a reality where that's not the case, but it's hard to reconcile that with seeing these things happen again and again.
How strong is a democracy? What is the price of freedom and liberty, and how resistant are any of the world's well-resourced democracies to this sort of high-level corruption? Were they ever resistant to it? Were democracy and technopolitics always merely a smokescreen over invisible perpetuations of the perennial brutal principle of "might makes right" and any egalitarian, humanist drive somewhat doomed to never fully (or even partially) succeed?