Nearly two years ago, FBI Director Chris Wray set up an office tasked solely with stopping the type of Russian interference efforts that infected the 2016 campaign.

On Wednesday night, Trump undercut the whole operation in a matter of seconds.

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In an ABC News interview, the president first proclaimed he would have no problem accepting dirt on his opponents from a foreign power, then said Wray was “wrong” to suggest the FBI needs to know about such offers.

The comments, according to interviews with nearly a dozen law enforcement veterans, have undone months of work, essentially inviting foreign spies to meddle with 2020 presidential campaigns and demoralizing the agents trying to stop them. And it’s backed Wray into a corner, they added, putting him in a position where he might have to either publicly chastise the president and risk getting fired, or resign in protest.

America’s enemies will see Trump’s comments and likely “come out of the woodwork like never before to try to influence the president,” said longtime FBI veteran Frank Figliuzzi, who served as the bureau’s assistant director for counterintelligence until 2012. “And it’s going to be more difficult to defend against because they’ll try harder than ever to mask their attempts.”

Trump has broken all manner of traditional protocol during his presidency when it comes to law enforcement and the intelligence community. His calls early on in his administration to launch investigations into his political opponents were widely panned by Justice Department veterans who deemed the Oval Office requests as out of line. But more recently, Trump has found an ally in William Barr, the new attorney general who has taken the president up on his demand for a wider examination into the origins of the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

With Trump’s latest comments, aired Wednesday night, the president has resurrected a question that special counsel Robert Mueller just spent nearly two years investigating — is it collusion to accept damaging information on an opponent from foreign agents attempting to interfere in a U.S. election?

“It’s not an interference,” Trump told the anchor George Stephanopoulos, a former Bill Clinton White House communications director. “They have information, I think I’d take it.”

Trump described such offers as “opposition research” and said he’d call the FBI only “if I thought there was something wrong.”

Some linked Trump’s remarks to Mueller’s deliberation over whether his team could have charged anyone on the Trump campaign if they had obtained the promised hurtful information on Hillary Clinton from a Kremlin intermediate during a much-scrutinized Trump Tower meeting. Mueller’s report said he wasn’t sure the potential information had financial value, meaning it might not qualify as an illegal campaign contribution from a foreign entity. The report also raised questions about whether there was a free-speech right to receive the information.

“It’s turning the First Amendment into a suicide pact that allows our own government to be undermined,” said Rick Hasen, a professor at the University of California’s Irvine’s law school, who also said the special counsel’s findings “a green light for foreign intervention in the 2020 election, and that was affirmed by what Trump said to ABC.”

Current and former Trump officials downplayed the president’s remarks as just Trump being Trump. While the comments drive Democrats mad and consume the media, they only matter to rank-and-file government workers if it doesn’t actually come with direct orders, they argued.

“I think people take it in stride until he tries to operationalize it,” said a former Trump White House official.

Spokespersons at both the DOJ and FBI declined to comment on the president’s remarks.

Just three months after Wray assumed the top FBI post in August 2017, he told Congress that he had set up a “foreign influence” task force to stymie future election meddling efforts.

The team brings together counter-intelligence, cyber and counter-terrorism officials — nearly 40 in total, according to a New York Times story — and coordinates with all 56 FBI field offices. It also works with the Homeland Security Department, state and local governments, as well as the major social media companies that Russian agents used to spread disinformation and stage fake rallies meant to incite anger.

The breadth of the effort has to match the scale of the problem, Wray said at a White House briefing last August. “Make no mistake — the scope of this foreign influence threat is both broad and deep,” he said.

Wray also took his warnings to Capitol Hill last month, telling lawmakers that campaigns must be on the lookout for suspicious outreach efforts.

“I think my view is that if any public official or member of any campaign is contacted by any nation state or anybody acting on behalf of a nation state about influencing or interfering with our election, then that’s something that the FBI would want to know about,” Wray said.

The FBI’s work in recent years to combat foreign election interference has received consistent praise from lawmakers of all political leanings, as well as numerous Trump administration officials.

Barr called the task force a “very dynamic program” during a Senate hearing in May on Mueller’s final report, adding, “I’m very impressed with what they’re up to.” Vice President Mike Pence gave the efforts a shoutout at a cybersecurity conference in New York in the lead-up to the 2018 midterm election.

But law enforcement specialists said Trump has now made this work harder.

Frank Montoya, Jr., a former director of an FBI counterintelligence office from 2012-2014, said Trump’s mindset about foreign influence presents “real dangers” to U.S. national security.

“One, our adversaries will see it as an invitation to interfere in the next election on his behalf,” he said. “But worse is the open door Trump has enabled for all manner of influence operations to continue against U.S. interests.”

David Kris, a former Obama-era assistant attorney general for national security, argued that Trump’s latest comments essentially mark the second time he’s publicly asked for Russian help to win a presidential election. During the 2016 campaign, Trump memorably proclaimed that if Russia was “listening,” it should go after Clinton’s “missing” emails — a comment he later said was made in jest.

“U.S. law enforcement, intelligence and security officials will do what they can to protect the integrity of our democratic processes,” said Kris, the founder of the intelligence consulting firm Culper Partners, “while being publicly contradicted and undermined by their boss.”

Other former law enforcement veterans said the president’s remarks will hurt morale inside the FBI and the other departments working on election security issues.

“I cannot tell you how profoundly troubling this is to the core of my professional experience,” said a former longtime national security official.

“It has to be demoralizing to some extent and confusing and, let’s face it, unprecedented, to have a commander in chief who has such a lack of fundamental understanding about the work the Justice Department and intelligence community do in this area,” added Greg Brower, the former top FBI liaison to Congress who served under Wray during his opening months in the director’s job.

“To flat out say the FBI director is wrong on this or any other issue is, in and of itself, stunning” Brower added. “It’s tougher for the leadership, the appointees of the president, who know the president is wrong, who have to wonder about his fundamental lack of understanding about what those agencies are doing.”

Jim Baker, who served as the FBI’s general counsel under FBI Director James Comey, told POLITICO that the remarks could put Wray in a position where he might have to resign in protest if he can’t convince the president to change his tune.

Wray needs to join Barr “to have a discussion with [Trump], and if they don’t get a sense of comfort then they’ll have some hard decisions to make,” Baker said. “I don’t think they should run for the exits right away, but they can’t just ignore this one. This is potentially encouraging criminal activity and undermining federal law.”

In the meantime, the message for the bureau’s rank-and-file is that everything should be business as usual, said David Laufman, a former top DOJ national security official who retired in 2018.

“Notice is certainly taken within the ranks of the FBI and the intelligence community when the president of the United States says things that, on their face, are utterly antithetical to the common mission to protect our national security,” said Laufman, who had a key role overseeing the early stages of the FBI’s Russia investigation before Mueller’s appointment.

“While off the cuff remarks made during an interview are not equivalent to executive orders,” he continued, “it seems to me very important for leadership at the FBI and in the intelligence community to reinforce with their agency personnel that nothing has changed in the agencies’ commitment to countering foreign influence operations.”

Marc Caputo contributed to this report.

Federal tax payments by big businesses are falling much faster than anticipated in the wake of Republicans’ tax cuts, providing ammunition to Democrats who are calling for corporate tax increases.

The U.S. Treasury saw a 31 percent drop in corporate tax revenues last year, almost twice the decline official budget forecasters had predicted. Receipts were projected to rebound sharply this year, but so far they’ve only continued to fall, down by almost 9 percent or $11 billion.

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Though business profits remain healthy and the economy is strong, total corporate taxes are at the lowest levels seen in more than 50 years.

At the same time, overall taxes paid by individuals under the new tax law are up so far this year by 3 percent, thanks to higher wages and salaries, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Last year tax payments by individuals went up 4 percent.

The drop comes even as some Republicans, such as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, have claimed, dubiously, that the law will pay for itself.

The revenue decline may fan complaints the law gave too much to big business and provide new fodder for Democrats now trying to roll back the cuts. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic presidential candidate, is calling for a dramatic increase in corporate taxes while House Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) has proposed hiking the corporate rate by a percentage point to help pay for expanded breaks for low- and middle-income people.

Analysts agree they can’t yet explain the decline in corporate tax payments.

They have a host of theories though, such as businesses making wider-than-expected use of the law’s expanded breaks for business investments. It may also be an unexpected side effect of President Donald Trump’s trade wars.

“I don’t think any of us can point to something specific and say this is definitely what’s going on,” said Kyle Pomerleau, chief economist at the Tax Foundation.

Analysts expected corporate payments to fall in the wake of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which slashed the corporate tax rate by 14 percentage points, to 21 percent, and expanded breaks for buying machinery and equipment.

In April 2018, less than four months after the cuts were signed into law, the nonpartisan CBO predicted corporate receipts would drop that year to $243 billion, which would have been an 18 percent decline from 2017. But payments ended up coming in at $205 billion, a nearly one-third decline from the previous year.

Then, in January, CBO projected receipts would bounce back this year, increasing by 20 percent or $40 billion. But through last month, they’re down 8.7 percent.

CBO says it isn’t sure what’s happening.

“Weakness in corporate tax collections” goes “beyond that which can be explained by currently available data on business activity,” the agency says.

One reason, CBO says, could be that companies shifted deductible expenses — like funding for their workers’ pensions — into 2017, when the corporate rate was still 35 percent, because that made those deductions worth more. That would still show up in the government’s data for the 2018 fiscal year, which began in October 2017. The agency doesn’t know the extent to which that might be happening.

Other analysts see other possibilities.

Companies may be making greater use of so-called expensing, an incentive that allows them to immediately write off the cost of investments rather than having to stagger them over a number of years. Having more stuff to deduct means smaller tax bills. If that’s the case, it could mean receipts will rebound in coming years because companies will not have those write-offs available to them in the future.

Another potential explanation: Trump’s tariffs, which could hurt corporate tax revenues in two ways. If a U.S. company that relies on components made in China suddenly sees the cost of those items increase, it will have more to deduct as business expenses. Alternatively, if a company is seeing fewer sales because it is passing along the cost of the tariffs to its customers, it will have fewer profits to tax.

“You either reduce business receipts or increase deductible costs, and either of those things reduce corporate taxable income,” said Pomerleau. “It may mean corporate tax liability is lower than we expected not because our projections of the TCJA were wrong, but maybe because we didn’t account for the fact that tariffs were going to lower corporate receipts.”

A fourth possible factor: The law isn’t reducing profit shifting by multinational corporations as much as forecasters expected. By cutting the corporate rate, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was supposed to reduce the incentive for companies operating in multiple countries to stockpile profits abroad, out of the reach of the IRS.

Overall corporate revenues last year amounted to 1 percent of GDP, a level they’ve dipped to only twice since 1965. Both of those previous instances, in 2009 and 1983, came in the wake of recessions, when business profits had cratered.

Michael Bennet stood and applauded when President Donald Trump declared in his State of the Union address “that America will never be a socialist country.” Seth Moulton has said a democratic socialist won’t win the White House in 2020.

On Thursday, John Hickenlooper went further: Democrats aren’t socialists, the former Colorado governor said at a speech in Washington, and Democratic candidates for president should stop embracing Bernie Sanders and his liberal policies if they want to oust President Donald Trump in 2020.

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For weeks, bottom-dwelling centrists in the Democratic primary have decried socialism while largely avoiding directly attacking Sanders, the only self-described democratic socialist in the 24-person primary. Hickenlooper and former Maryland Rep. John Delaney wielded the argument recently to grab attention they’ve desperately sought.

California Democrats booed both candidates earlier this month, when Hickenlooper told a convention of liberal activists that “socialism is not the answer” to beating Trump and Delaney dismissed Medicare for All as neither “good policy, nor is it good politics.”

For candidates polling around 1 percent, negative attention is still attention.

Sanders, for his part, gave his own speech this week defending democratic socialism. On Wednesday, the independent Vermont senator proposed a “21st century economic Bill of Rights” that would ensure the right to a decent job, health care, affordable housing, higher education, secure retirement and a clean environment.

He also tied himself to four-term president Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose “progressive coalition created the New Deal” and “an economy that worked for all and not just the few,” Sanders said.

The timing couldn’t have been more perfect for Hickenlooper, who had planned a Thursday morning speech at the National Press Club in Washington on abortion rights and health care initiatives that were implemented in Colorado. By Wednesday, however, his campaign had announced a new topic: Sanders and socialism.

Hickenlooper opened his 18-minute remarks immediately invoking Sanders. “I have great respect for Sen. Sanders,” he said. “He’s provided clarity and urgency around the major issues for working families. But I fundamentally disagree that we should do away with the democratic-regulated capitalism that has guided this country for over 200 years.”

Hickenlooper insisted his stance “is shared by many of my Democratic colleagues.” “But for some reason,” he lamented, “our party has been reluctant to express directly its opposition to democratic socialism. In fact, the Democratic field has not only failed to oppose Sen. Sanders’ agenda, but they’ve actually pushed to embrace it.”

He took at aim at most of the field, noting that a majority of candidates “support at least one of Sanders’ various proposals.” He whacked Medicare for All for not taking on “fee for service,” cast the Green New Deal as legislation that will never make it through Congress and framed free college as misplaced spending that ignores the fact that roughly two-thirds of Americans will never receive a four-year degree.

“Democrats,” Hickenlooper said, “must say loudly and clearly that we are not socialists. If we do not, we will end up helping to reelect the worst president in this country’s history.”

Republicans have sought to paint the Democratic Party as “socialist Democrats,” an effort Hickenlooper noted fell flat during the 2018 midterms but warned could prove effective with Sanders at the top of the ticket in 2020.

“Republicans may call Democrats ‘socialists’ no matter how moderate we truly are,” Hickenlooper said. “Democratic socialism is not only a poor electoral strategy — it’s a disastrous governing model. While Sanders has attacked those in the center for preaching incrementalism — the reality is that pragmatists don’t say ‘no’ to big ideas, they figure out how to actually get them done. While government plays a vital role in tackling big challenges, it has rarely been successful alone.”

Though Sanders is a top-tier candidate who often trails only former Vice President Joe Biden in national polls, other moderate candidates like Hickenlooper, Delaney, Bennet and Moulton are stuck around 1 percent. Moulton will likely be one of only four candidates who won’t appear on stage at the first back-to-back debates in Miami later this month.

Hickenlooper, however, was adamant that his message as an accomplished governor who got things done is resonating with voters, despite his poor standing in the polls.

“My problem is not what I’m selling. It’s how do I get that information to the buyer — and luckily I’m unemployed,” he quipped to reporters after his address. “If I’m wrong, I’ll have wasted three or four months of my life having an amazing, fascinating experience. I don’t see a downside.”