Russian intelligence operatives were behind the theft

Jan 25th, 2019 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog
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Roger Stone’s turn:

The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, revealed on Friday the most direct link yet between the Trump campaign’s and WikiLeaks’ parallel efforts to use Democratic Party material stolen by Russians to damage the campaign of Hillary R. Clinton.

In an indictment unsealed on Friday, the special counsel disclosed evidence that a top campaign official in 2016 dispatched Roger J. Stone, a longtime adviser to President Trump, to get information from WikiLeaks about the thousands of hacked Democratic emails. The effort began well after it was widely reported that Russian intelligence operatives were behind the theft, which was part of Moscow’s broad campaign to sabotage the 2016 president election.

The indictment makes no mention of whether Mr. Trump played a role in the coordination, though Mr. Mueller did leave a curious clue about how high in the campaign the effort reached.: A senior campaign official “was directed” by an unnamed person to contact Mr. Stone about additional WikiLeaks releases that might damage the Clinton campaign, according to the court document.

Meanwhile Comey was busy working on his speech about…Clinton’s emails.

The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, sought to broadly distance Mr. Trump from the charges. “The charges brought against Mr. Stone have nothing to do with the president,” she told CNN. Asked whether he directed a campaign aide to contact Mr. Stone about the WikiLeaks emails, she repeated that the charges did not involve the president.

And how could we possibly doubt her?

A day before Mr. Stone and Mr. Bannon emailed about WikiLeaks, Donald Trump Jr. exchanged Twitter messages with the WikiLeaks Twitter account and asked, “What’s behind this Wednesday leak I keep reading about.”

At the end of that week, on Oct. 7, WikiLeaks released more than 6,000 emails related to John D. Podesta, the chairman of the Clinton campaign. The release came 30 minutes after The Washington Post published a recording of Mr. Trump bragging on the set of “Access Hollywood” about assaulting women.

And here we are, trapped with this criminal monster bent on destroying the country and having a lot of success at it.

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