The Plot Thickens

Late Monday, The Atlantic magazine broke the story (link here) about how Donald Trump's oldest son, Don Jr., directly communicated with Wikileaks in the final two months of the 2016 campaign. The Washington Post shortly thereafer published a good summary about how this all transpired (link here).

Intelligence experts widely believe the Russian government, under Vladimir Putin's direct orders, was disseminating much of the information they hacked through Wikileaks.

This revelation is highly important because it shows the Trump campaign was effectively colluding with the Russia government, and specifically their spies, through the intermediary of Wikileaks. In spy lingo, this go-between is called a cut-out and is regularly used in espionage.

Yesterday, NBC published an interesting piece analyzing what this all means (link here). These two lines are particularly noteworthy: (1) "Remember, the U.S. intel community said Russia intended to discredit the election results if Clinton had won -- exactly what WikiLeaks was instructing Trump Jr to do." (2) "Also remember that Trump mentioned ‘WikiLeaks’ 145 times during the final month of the 2016 campaign."

Jennifer Rubin at The Washington Post wrote a superb column yesterday (link here) that ends with this commentary:

"At bottom this is also a political question, namely whether Trump’s conduct violated his oath of office and whether he abused the powers of the presidency to protect himself from embarrassment. Republican tribalists likely will never reach that conclusion, but a member of Congress viewing in good faith all this evidence in context (plus Trump’s attacks on the courts and press, his compulsive lying and his refusal to protect the country against further Russian interference) could — and I would suggest, should — reach a different result."

Undoubtedly, Special Counsel Robert Mueller is combing through all this evidence in his criminal investigation of Trump, his campaign, and his associates.

Stay tuned.