542

I mean if this is true-and the Guardian reporter, Luke Harding, is very reliable but we’ll see who else is able to corroborate it, this is a grue gamechanger. Which is going on a limb on as huge a scandal as Russiagate which every day provides new information that in any normal time would be a gamechanger. But in Russiagate it’s tough to digest each new bombshell to properly contextualize it and put it in a proper proportion to all the previous bombshells we already knew.

Just this morning I wrote a chapter discussing the news that Mueller asserts Manafort broke his plea agreement by telling multiple lies and that therefore he should face sentencing now-the Manafort team concurs that sentencing should start now though they insist Manafort ‘tried to answer everything truthfully.’

But that’s what’s so tough about documenting this scandal-and why writing this book has been no small undertaking…-every bomshell becomes dated by the next news cycle. But if Harding’s reporting is true this is truly earth shaking even among all the earth shaking things we learn every day and puts everything we previously thought we knew via public sources in a brand new perspective:

Again if true then how is this not Russia collusion game-set-match? Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager met with Assange the month he started on the Trump campaign. It blows everything we previously thought we knew about Russia collusion.

Yes, the fact that it happened a day after we learned he lied to Mueller doesn’t seem to be a ‘coincidence’ either-but anyway, coincidences take a lot of planning.

And it just changes the significance of everything we previously knew:

There are many interesting aspects of this new Guardian bombshell report about Manafort:

https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/1067455769946349569

Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign, the Guardian has been told.

Again we previously have had no information that suggested a direct relationship between Manafort and Assange. Roger Stone through Jerome Corsi and/or Randy Credico, we also know about the Mercers’ and Cambridge Analytica’s attempts to reach out to Assange. We also saw in (Chapter B) that somehow CA had the  Clinton campaign emails a month before Wikileaks released them publicly.

We know about the conversations between Donald Jr and Wikileaks.

 

It is unclear why Manafort would have wanted to see Assange and what was discussed. But the last apparent meeting is likely to come under scrutiny and could interest Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.”

Is it plausible that if this story is true that Mueller doesn’t already know about it? Some argue not at all plausible.

 

Sources have said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016 – during the period when he was made a key figure in Trump’s push for the White House..”

So it gets even more amazing-Manafort reportedly also visited Assange in 2013 and 2015.”

Regarding 2013, as we saw in (Chapter C), we know for a fact that Assange-despite the reputation he has tried to foment as a politically independent transparency advocate, actually was already talking in 2013 about the need for GOP candidate from the ‘libertarian wing’ of the party to win the 2016 election and the dump of Wikileaks messages earlier this year-finally those who live off of doxing others got doxxed themselves-showed Assange’s support in 2014-2015 for the GOP to win the 2016 elections; ie, he was far from just a supporter of Trump but of the entire GOP. If these meetings happened then it would make sense-as Assange is a GOPer.

“A well-placed source has told the Guardian that Manafort went to see Assange around March 2016. Months later WikiLeaks released a stash of Democratic emails stolen by Russian intelligence officers.”

Manafort, 69, denies involvement in the hack and says the claim is “100% false”. His lawyers declined to answer the Guardian’s questions about the visits.

In a series of tweets WikiLeaks said Assange and Manafort had not met. Assange described the story as a hoax.

Manafort was jailed this year and was thought to have become a star cooperator in the Mueller inquiry. But on Monday Mueller said Manafort had repeatedly lied to the FBI, despite agreeing to cooperate two months ago in a plea deal. According to a court document, Manafort had committed “crimes and lies” on a “variety of subject matters”.

Indeed, the question that begs is if this is the something very big Manafort may have lied about to Mueller that led to the Special Counsel’s voiding the plea agreement.

His defence team says he believes what he has told Mueller to be truthful and has not violated his deal.

This is the same defense being used by Corsi-‘I may not have told the truth but I didn’t realize I wasn’t telling the truth’-speaking of which there’s yet another new bombshell about Corsi and the emails he exchanged with Roger Stone in the months before Wikileaks’ dump of Podesta’s emails. But that’s for a new chapter-link when done Mike.

In the Manafort’s 2013 visit, his name was reportedly logged in next to the word ‘Russians.’

A separate internal document written by Ecuador’s Senain intelligence agency and seen by the Guardian lists “Paul Manaford [sic]” as one of several well-known guests. It also mentions “Russians”.

According to the sources, Manafort returned to the embassy in 2015. He paid another visit in spring 2016, turning up alone, around the time Trump named him as his convention manager. The visit is tentatively dated to March.

Manafort’s 2016 visit to Assange lasted about 40 minutes, one source said, adding that the American was casually dressed when he exited the embassy, wearing sandy-coloured chinos, a cardigan and a light-coloured shirt.

As I’m trying to land the plane that is this book, this seems to be an even bigger week for new game changing bombshells than usual.

Indeed, in the middle of writing this chapter on the Guardian’s absolutely stunning-if true-story about Manafort’s meeting with Assange, CNN broke yet another Manafort-Assange story-that Mueller is investigating a meeting Manafort had with the Ecuadorean President in 2017. 

“In another development, CNN contributor Carl Bernstein reported Tuesday that Mueller’s team has been investigating a meeting between Manafort and Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno in Quito in 2017 and has specifically asked if WikiLeaks or Assange was discussed in the meeting, according to a source with personal knowledge of the matter”.

“In November 2017, The Associated Press reported that Moreno publicly acknowledged meeting with Manafort and a group of Chinese businessmen who wanted to privatize the country’s electric corporation. Moreno said the proposal was rejected.”

As noted above, the question begs if this alleged meeting with Assange was that something big that Manafort lied to Mueller about. The fact that Mueller is investigating Manafort’s meeting with the Ecuadorian President would seem to make it even more plausible that Manafort did in fact meet with Assange. It’s also emerged that the Trump Russia House met with Ecuador yesterday.

Yesterday, Special Counsel Robert Mueller revealed that Paul Manafort had lied to him so egregiously, he was ripping up their plea deal. This morning The Guardian reported that Manafort visited Julian Assange three times at the Ecuadorian embassy, including once during the 2016 election. This afternoon CNN reported that Manafort met with the President of Ecuador in 2017. Now it turns out Trump’s team met with Ecuador just yesterday.

The U.S. State Department posted a blurb today on its official website which would have gone unnoticed if not for everything else that’s unfolding. The headline is “Secretary Pompeo’s Meeting With Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Jose Valencia and Finance Minister Richard Martinez” and the press release goes on to reveal that the meeting took place yesterday.

This means that, just hours before Mueller announced that Manafort had lied to him, and Manafort’s secret Ecuador-related meetings became public, the Trump regime met with Ecuador. Could this have been a coincidence? Absolutely. But when it comes to Donald Trump trying to cover up his scandals, we’ve seen that these kinds of things very rarely are a coincidence.

So what could Team Trump have been trying to get from the government of Ecuador yesterday? The most obvious possibility: a last ditch effort to convince Ecuador not to turn Julian Assange over to Robert Mueller. Again, this meeting could simply have been about the “U.S.-Ecuador Trade and Investment Council” as the State Department has claimed. But it would be one heck of a coincidence.”

This also makes you remember the reporting that the Russia House considered pardoning Assange that we covered in (Chapter A) 

Also that the Cambridge Analytica Director-the same CA that somehow had possession of Wikileaks’ hacked emails a month before they were released met with Assange in 2017 as noted in (Chapter B). 

Ok, so big picture, 20,000 foot view: if this is true then it’s game-set-match-Trump’s about to be hired campaign manager met with Assange in March, 2016. This on top of what we already knew regarding his meeting with Konstantin Kilimnik in early August in NYC and them discussing specifically the DNC hacks. 

It may not be true but we also know that Mueller is investigating Manafort’s meeting with the Ecuadorian President in 2017 which suggests that the idea he met previously with Assange is not absurd. But then the news on Coris and Stone’s emails that broke today are also pretty much game-set-match on collusion.

Indeed, what’s ironic is that when Manafort begun his plea deal with Mueller one logical premise was that he was going to tell Manafort about Roger Stone’s communications with Assange. Now it seems that Manafort himself had huge connections with Assange.

But either way the Coris-Stone emails are only somewhat overshadowed because of how shocking the Manafort reveal is. More on the Corsi-Stone emails on a chapter I will now get to (Chapter X). If you think landing a plane is tough try finishing this book…

As for Manafort, we will all be waiting with bated breath when Manafort reports on exactly what it is that Manafort lied about.

UPDATE:  Yesterday, the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi wrote a piece suggesting that as the Guardian piece hasn’t been corroborated by other news organizations, there’s probably no there there. 

Maybe. But then sometimes a story comes out that other news organizations decide a priori doesn’t ring true  and don’t try very had to corroborate. Sometimes they decide this in advance of any evidence-like Reagan-Iran collusion as we see in (Chapter A).

We don’t know why the story hasn’t been corroborated-it could be that the sources will only talk to the Guardian or refuse to speak to American organizations-you never know as there are any number of possible reasons.

That Farhi himself is not very well disposed to the story of Manafort-Assange is underscored by the fact that the only real journalistic authority in his piece is: notorious anti anti Trumper, Glenn Greenwald who-kind of like the NYTimes-only jumps to the worst conclusions before seeing the evidence if the subject is Hillary Clinton.

Greenwald continues to live in a total state of denial about both Russian interference in the 2016 election in general and Assange’s role in particular-he still acts as if Assange is a politically independent ‘transparency activist’ while its become abundantly clear Assange has been little more than a glorified GOP opposition researcher going back to 2013 (Chapter B).

But the story of Manafort-Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy circa 2013-2016 is not absurd on its face when you consider a NYTimes story that came out yesterday that reports Manafort met was at the embassy in 2017 and discussed a deal that would have brought Assange to the U.S. 

In mid-May 2017, Paul Manafort, facing intensifying pressure to settle debts and pay mounting legal bills, flew to Ecuador to offer his services to a potentially lucrative new client — the country’s incoming president, Lenín Moreno.

Mr. Manafort made the trip mainly to see if he could broker a deal under which China would invest in Ecuador’s power system, possibly yielding a fat commission for Mr. Manafort.

But the talks turned to a diplomatic sticking point between the United States and Ecuador: the fate of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

In at least two meetings with Mr. Manafort, Mr. Moreno and his aides discussed their desire to rid themselves of Mr. Assange, who has been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012, in exchange for concessions like debt relief from the United States, according to three people familiar with the talks, the details of which have not been previously reported.

They said Mr. Manafort suggested he could help negotiate a deal for the handover of Mr. Assange to the United States, which has long investigated Mr. Assange for the disclosure of secret documents and which later filed charges against him that have not yet been made public.”

Mr. Manafort and WikiLeaks have both denied a recent report in The Guardian that Mr. Manafort visited Mr. Assange at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London in 2013, 2015 and 2016.

But in light of this Times piece, it’s hard to say that the assertion in the Guardian piece is logically absurd on its face. Of course, this is the NYTimes and so it has qualms about connecting the most obvious dots and leaping to any conclusion without ‘absolute evidence’-provided the subject isn’t Hillary Clinton. If it is then they assume the worst case scenario first-lock her up!-and then have 50 more stories attempting to substantiate lock her up! They never come close but each headline nevertheless amplifies lock her up! even more loudly and in an even less supported, blatantly ad hominem way.

There is no evidence that Mr. Manafort was working with — or even briefing — President Trump or other administration officials on his discussions with the Ecuadoreans about Mr. Assange. Nor is there any evidence that his brief involvement in the talks was motivated by concerns about the role that Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks played in facilitating the Russian effort to help Mr. Trump in the 2016 presidential election, or the investigation into possible coordination between Mr. Assange and Mr. Trump’s associates, which has become a focus for Mr. Mueller.

Well there might not be evidence-yet-though, a basic thesis of investigations is absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. And the idea that Manafort broached the idea of getting Assange into the U.S. for reasons wholly unrelated to Assange’s own outsize role in Russian interference and possible collusion-I love Wikileaks!-doesn’t pass the laugh test. I mean it’d be one heck of a coincidence-which takes a lot of planning. 

Indeed, I concur with Marcy Wheeler, in some ways this NYT piece is incredible.

The NYT has an unbelievable story about how Paul Manafort went to Ecuador to try to get Julian Assange turned over. I say it’s unbelievable because it is 28 paragraphs long, yet it never once explains whether Assange would be turned over to the US for prosecution or for a golf retirement. Instead, the story stops short multiple times of what it implies: that Manafort was there as part of paying off Trump’s part of a deal, but the effort stopped as soon as Mueller was appointed.”

Again, the Times is very fastidious in its refusal to connect any dots no matter how clear and obvious unless the subject is Hillary Clinton in which case they connect any possible two dots no matter how absurd and implausible.

That the effort at Manafort’s deal on Assange ended in perfect correlation with the appointment of Mueller is yet another ‘coincidence’ apparently.

Ms. Wheeler then goes on to document all the times that various Trump co-conspirators have tried to get a deal on Assange.

The story itself — which given that it stopped once Mueller was appointed must be a limited hangout revealing that Manafort tried to free Assange, complete with participation from the spox that Manafort unbelievably continues to employ from his bankrupt jail cell — doesn’t surprise me at all.

After all, the people involved in the election conspiracy made multiple efforts to free Assange.

WikiLeaks kicked off the effort at least by December, when they sent a DM to Don Jr suggesting Trump should make him Australian Ambassador to the US.

Hi Don. Hope you’re doing well! In relation to Mr. Assange: Obama/Clinton placed pressure on Sweden, UK and Australia (his home country) to illicitly go after Mr. Assange. It would be real easy and helpful for your dad to suggest that Australia appoint Assange ambassador to DC “That’s a really smart tough guy and the most famous australian you have! ” or something similar. They won’t do it, but it will send the right signals to Australia, UK + Sweden to start following the law and stop bending it to ingratiate themselves with the Clintons. 12/16/16 12:38PM

Weeks later, Hannity would go to the Embassy to interview Assange. Assange fed him the alternate view of how he obtained the DNC emails, a story that would be critical to Trump’s success at putting the election year heist behind him, if it were successful. Trump and Hannity pushed the line that the hackers were not GRU, but some 400 pound guy in someone’s basement.

Then the effort actually shifted to Democrats and DOJ. Starting in February through May 2017, Oleg Deripaska and Julian Assange broker Adam Waldman tried to convince Bruce Ohr or Mark Warner to bring Assange to the US, using the threat of the Vault 7 files as leverage. In February, Jim Comey told DOJ to halt that effort. But Waldman continued negotiations, offering to throw testimony from Deripaska in as well. He even used testimony from Christopher Steele as leverage.

This effort has been consistently spun by the Mark Meadows/Devin Nunes/Jim Jordan crowd — feeding right wing propagandists like John Solomon — as an attempt to obstruct a beneficial counterintelligence discussion. It’s a testament to the extent to which GOP “investigations” have been an effort to spin an attempt to coerce freedom for Assange.

Shortly after this effort failed, Manafort picked it up, as laid out by the NYT. That continued until Mueller got hired.

There may have been a break (or maybe I’m missing the next step). But by the summer, Dana Rohrabacher and Chuck Johnson got in the act, with Rohrabacher going to the Embassy to learn the alternate story, which he offered to share with Trump.

Next up was Bill Binney, whom Trump started pushing Mike Pompeo to meet with, to hear Binney’s alternative story.

At around the same time, WikiLeaks released the single Vault 8 file they would release, followed shortly by Assange publicly re-upping his offer to set up a whistleblower hotel in DC.

Those events contributed to a crackdown on Assange and may have led to the jailing of accused Vault 7 source Joshua Schulte.

In December, Ecuador and Russia started working on a plan to sneak Assange out of the Embassy.

A few weeks later, Roger Stone got into the act, telling Randy Credico he was close to winning Assange a pardon.

These efforts have all fizzled, and I suspect as Mueller put together more information on Trump’s conspiracy with Russia, not only did the hopes of telling an alternative theory fade, but so did the possibility that a Trump pardon for Assange would look like anything other than a payoff for help getting elected. In June, the government finally got around to charging Schulte for Vault 7. But during the entire time he was in jail, he was apparently still attempting to leak information, which the government therefore obtained on video.

Regarding Stone’s assertion to Credico that he was ‘working on a blanket pardon for Assange’ it again underscores my own deep curiosity about Credico. While it’s clear that Jerome Corsi was clearly an important back channel for Stone to Assange-in terms of the subject and timing of the Podesta emails-I still think we know very little of the full truth of Credico’s role, who actually has a close relationship to one of Wikileaks’ top lawyers(Chapter C).

As for Manafort we will get to see his sentencing documents Friday-let’s hope they aren’t the information dud the Flynn docs were last night.

https://twitter.com/PuestoLoco/status/1070142328860495872

Which is not to say they were a legal dud-while Giuliani is claiming they show nothing-which is literally true-what they do show is that Flynn sung big time about bigger fish than himself so it’s not at all good news for Trump-quite the opposite.

https://twitter.com/PalmerReport/status/1070236837506105344

Indeed, the fact that the content of what Flynn actually helped on was redacted is a bad sign for Trump’s lawyers. But for those of us eager beavers in the #Resistance it was a letdown after waiting all day for it. Maybe we’ll get luckier on Manafort? Really hoping we will see what he lied to Mueller about.

Bill Palmer:

The real kicker is that Robert Mueller is set to file sentencing recommendations on Friday for his favorite cooperator Micheal Cohen, and his favorite punching bag, Paul Manafort. The expectation is that this time, Mueller will indeed include incriminating evidence against Donald Trump. By Friday, we expect Trump will be trying to hide under his desk.”

UPDATE: The MSM quickly decided this story was ‘fake news’ as no other outlet verified it-only a story about Clinton can be treated as fact wether corroborated or not.

Having said that it’s not clear this story isn’t true-it is a matter of fact that Manafort went to Ecuador and tried to get Assange’s release-so with that a known fact why is the idea that he met with Assange himself previously so hard to believe?

Seth Abramson has more analysis on the MSM’s hitherto dismissal of the story-the only at all decent reason for dismissing it is other news orgs haven’t verified it though this is an inference, logically a story can be only verified by one news org and still be accurate-particularly if it’s a very good news org like the Guardian.

This is one of the problems with MSM analysis generally-they still give the benefit of the doubt to Trump and his co-conspirators-something they never extended to Hillary Clinton. They are never able to realize that when a proven liar denies or asserts something one helpful method for gauging truth/falsity is wether the lie is in their interest-this is why mobsters are often believed in court testifying against the mob boss-what they are testifying to in that case is clearly not in their interest.

We know that Trump and his co-conspirators will deny anything if they think they can get away with it-they always count on the idea that even if they’re guilty the media won’t see proof and assume their denials are accurate.

But as Abramson says it’s rather astonishing that no one has wondered if the ‘senior Trump campaign official’ who directed Stone to find out what else Wikileaks has on Hillary on July 22, 2016-the day the leaked DNC emails forced Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to walk the plank the morning of the first day of the Democratic convention- was actually Manafort. After all they have a 40 year-at the time more like 37 year-friendship and partnership and Stone took personal credit for Manafort assuming the role of campaign manager.

We also now know that Manafort passed polling information to Konstantin Kilimnik-Trump’s co-conspirators have tried to trivialize this shocking information by saying ‘what’s wrong with passing around polling?’ Normally nothing but to a Russian intel operative with who Manafort also discussed ‘making himself whole’ with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska as well as offering Deripaska private campaign briefings, and also met with Kilimnik in NYC in early August and had an allegedly ‘casual political conversation’-somehow it was possible for Trump’s campaign manager to have a conversation with someone with Russian intel ties-knowing the role the GRU had with the hacking-not in his capacity as the campaign manager with Kilimnik supposedly not in his capacity as having Russian intel ties about of all topics, the hack of the DNC.

But when the Trump campaign manager and someone with Russian intel ties talked about the hack of the DNC by Russian intel operatives this was only a casual, innocent conversation where the campaign manager spoke not in his capacity as a campaign manager and the Russian intel operative spoke but not in his capacity as a Russian intel operative.

In light of all this Manafort passing along polling information to this same Russian intel operative is not exactly trivial-but who knows, maybe when he passed along campaign polling information he did it not his his capacity as a campaign manager but in a casual way like when they casually discussed the hacks they are accused of coordinating on.

Despite Manafort’s engaging in what very well could be campaign collusion with Russia-or certainly campaign coordination with Russia-to be more precise as that is what Mueller is investigating-the media has studiously avoided the very natural and logical question of wether or not Manafort was the senior campaign official in question who directed him to get the information from Assange on July 22, 2016 or more generally was coordinating Russian coordination with Stone. Because if they did then logically Luke Harding’s story is quite plausible.

Back to Seth Abramson:

Second worst reason-gee, both Manafort and Assange deny it and this is very surprising as the media evidently expected them to confirm it. 

Now for the only semi respectable reason-no other outlet has confirmed. But, after all, the Guardian is a British organization with many sources the American media lacks:

While the MSM dismisses a story allegedly because they can’t corroborate it, it’s happy to speculate without a shred of evidence that the Manafort-Assange story was a plant:

While dismissing Harding’s story because they can’t verify his UK sources, they come up with their own counternarrative based on no sources.

Abramson makes the same point I made above regarding the NYT”s own story about Manafort trying to negotiate Assange’s release..

You’d think so yet the MSM acted as if the NYT story in no way suggested maybe the Guardian story was on the right track.

Again we know about all Stone’s communications with Corsi about Assange on the one hand and with the Trump campaign on the other, what would be more natural than that Manafort-who was then the campaign manager to be the campaign operative who directed Stone to direct Corsi to find out what else Wikileaks had?

In any case it’s amazing that Manafort hasn’t been considered as the senior campaign official and clearly the best explanation is because the MSM has decided based on no evidence that the Guardian story is fake news.

As Abramson also points out, of all the Trump co-conspirator witnesses Stone and Assange are the ones truly acting strange-like they’re cool with prison or maybe angling for a pardon.

And this timidity by the MSM-on stories not about the Clintons-is perhaps both a blessing and a curse though as Jay Rosen documents there is also another kind of journalism-advocacy journalism which also has its place.

Abramson calls his own research curatorial journalism:

The MSM is also pretending the Buzzfeed story about Trump directing Cohen to lie doesn’t exist-they are much less concerned that the Trump Russia House pushed SCO to make that troubling denial and they denied the existence of the dossier throughout the entire duration of the 2016 campaign-and largely treated the Russiagate story as if it didn’t exist.

UPDATE 2.0: Obama’s former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan,  Barbara McQuade has her own thoughts on this directed senior Trump campaign aide:

“Why Is Mueller Hiding Who Ultimately ‘Directed’ Roger Stone to Contact WikiLeaks?”

The omission isn’t by accident. It could mean a conspiracy charge is coming, or even that Trump played a role.”

In paragraph 12, the indictment reads, “After the July 22, 2016 release of stolen DNC emails by Organization 1 [believed to be WikiLeaks], a senior Trump Campaign official was directed to contact STONE about any additional releases and what other damaging information [WikiLeaks] had regarding the Clinton Campaign.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team choose their words carefully. Why use the passive voice here unless intentionally trying to avoid using a noun? In other words, the sentence seems to be crafted to intentionally omit the name or description of the person who directed Stone to contact WikiLeaks. What’s that all about? Here are some theories.

First, who could have had the authority within the campaign to direct “a senior Trump Campaign official?” It seems that only an even more senior campaign official would wield this power. Steve Bannon? Paul Manafort? Trump himself? The list of possibilities is a short one. And wouldn’t Mueller have used a description of the person, such as “another senior campaign official” or “a more senior campaign official” if that was who was involved? The omission of the name or even a description of the person’s role hints that this person may be Trump himself, the one person who cannot be indicted under Department of Justice policy. In that case, we will have to wait for Mueller’s report, and hope that the report is public, to learn this person’s identity.

Second, what is the significance of this act? If a member of the campaign, or Trump himself, directed Stone to work with WikiLeaks to influence the election, this act could amount to a violation of campaign finance laws. It is a crime to solicit a thing of value from a foreign national to benefit a campaign. Opposition research against a political opponent could be considered to be a thing of value, and WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange is an Australian national who was trafficking in emails stolen by Russians. A solicitation of WikiLeaks for information harmful to Hillary Clinton could amount to a campaign finance violation by the campaign or the person who made this solicitation.

This knocks down yet another zombie idea of Trump and his GOP co-conspirators-that unless you can prove Trump directly ordered or involved in the hack and theft of the emails himself it’s all no big deal-doesn’t every one use hacked emails from a hostile foreign power?

Another zombie defense is that maybe the Trump campaign didn’t know the hack was done by the Russians.

Finally, why was this allegation included in an indictment alleging fairly narrow crimes of obstruction of proceedings, false statements and witness tampering? A clue appears in paragraph 2, which states that in June 2016, the DNC “publicly announced that it had been hacked by Russian government actors.” Coupled with the directive alleged in paragraph 12, this statement could be the basis for an indictment charging conspiracy to defraud the United States by interfering with the fair administration of elections. If the public knew that Russia stole the email messages by June, then the Trump campaign and whoever “directed” Stone also knew that Russia stole the email messages in July. This person who was directing Stone to coordinate with Wikileaks about “additional releases” and “other damaging information” about Hillary Clinton, then, knew that Wikileaks was working with Russia. Is this the groundwork for an upcoming charge or report of so-called “collusion?”

It was public knowledge by then so it’s implausible to say the least the Trump campaign was unaware. Indeed, as we see in Chapter A, Roger Stone himself in late July-early August-just after he directed Corsi to find out what else Wikileaks had  at the direction of this senior campaign aide and for a few days after  Corsi got back to him with some very accurate predictions on August 2, 2016 regarding not just the subject of the hack-Podesta-but the timing of the release-October-was telling everyone it may be Russia and to benefit the Trump campaign.

 

 

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