Day 299: Donald Trump, Jr.: The Bridge Between WikiLeaks and Team Trump

Donald Trump, Jr. has long been the Fredo Corleone of the Trump family. In addition to generally being seen as an bumbling moron desperate for his father’s approval, he compounds that with leaving a paper trail seemingly everywhere he goes.

First, there was the meeting with Russian official in Trump Tower in June 2016. Initially, he claimed it was about adoptions, but taken to the woodshed over and over by the press about that lie, he was forced to release all of his correspondence from that meeting and disclose that it wasn’t just about adoptions.

Now, he been busted dancing with WikiLeaks.

As a reminder, the CIA, FBI and NSA have long-considered WikiLeaks to benefit from a disturbingly close relationship with Russian intelligence, as the DNI’s report from earlier this year pointed out.

We assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks.

The DNI’s report also concluded:

The Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet RT (formerly Russia Today) has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks. RT’s editor-in-chief visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in August 2013, where they discussed renewing his broadcast contract with RT, according to Russian and Western media. Russian media subsequently announced that RT had become “the only Russian media company” to partner with WikiLeaks and had received access to “new leaks of secret information.” RT routinely gives Assange sympathetic coverage and provides him a platform to denounce the United States.

In other words, the Russian government and WikiLeaks are, at this point, thick as thieves. They benefit from a symbiotic relationship: Russia can use WikiLeaks to disseminate information it wants in the public domain without having their fingerprints on it; WikiLeaks gets to simultaneously make the U.S. look bad and cozy up to a powerful government as they become more and more constrained by the current political environment.

Now, as The Atlantic reported, WikiLeaks used Junior as a go-between on at least a couple occasions. Junior passed at least one WikiLeaks message to the most senior people on Trump’s team.

Though Trump Jr. mostly ignored the frequent messages from WikiLeaks, he at times appears to have acted on its requests. When WikiLeaks first reached out to Trump Jr. about putintrump.org, for instance, Trump Jr. followed up on his promise to “ask around.” According to a source familiar with the congressional investigations into Russian interference with the 2016 campaign, who requested anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, on the same day that Trump Jr. received the first message from WikiLeaks, he emailed other senior officials with the Trump campaign, including Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Brad Parscale, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, telling them WikiLeaks had made contact. Kushner then forwarded the email to campaign communications staffer Hope Hicks. At no point during the 10-month correspondence does Trump Jr. rebuff WikiLeaks, which had published stolen documents and was already observed to be releasing information that benefited Russian interests.

Perhaps most incredibly, WikiLeaks admits that it is a pro-Trump and pro-Russia source. While he never responded to it, WikiLeaks asked Junior to send some of his father’s tax returns so they could leak them. In WikiLeaks’ mind, this would “dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality. This is the real kicker. That means that the vast amount of stuff that we are publishing on Clinton will have much higher impact, because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source.”

WikiLeaks goes on to ask Junior to contest the election and rally his base if his father was to lose and expose rampant corruption at various levels of the electoral system.

Junior, having already seen most of his correspondence reported in The Atlantic (and already provided to Congress), belatedly tweeted screenshots of what he claimed to be every direct message exchanged between himself and WikiLeaks.

To date, this is the most publicly-available evidence that WikiLeaks — again, an arm for the Russian government — was working with the Trump team to disseminate decidedly one-sided information.

299 days in, 1163 to go

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