Day 677: Multiple bombshell collusion accusations with WikiLeaks — and therefore Russia — hound Trump

Donald Trump has continued to move the goal posts about the Robert Mueller probe. Lately he has simply taken to ad hominem attacks against the special counsel and his team.

Yet, he also likes to shout “no collusion” over and over into the abyss. But that claim continues to take hit after hit after hit.

Tuesday, “no collusion” took a vicious one-two punch.

First, U.K.’s The Guardian published a bombshell report that alleges that Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

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.

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.

Despite Manafort and WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange denying the meeting, the report notes that a source even knew what Manafort wore to his final meeting: “sandy-coloured chinos, a cardigan and a light-coloured shirt.”

The timeline is more than a little curious and appears to overlap with Manafort’s working for Trump:

• February 2016: Manafort reaches out to Trump about joining campaign
• March 2016: Manafort joins the Trump campaign
• Spring 2016: Assange and Manafort meet in London
• April 2016: Hackers infiltrate DNC
• April 2016: George Papadopoulos, an adviser to the Trump campaign (who later pleaded guilty for lying to the FBI), is told by a Russia-linked professor that Russians have “thousands of emails” that serve as “dirt” on Clinton
• June 2016: Meeting occurs in Trump Tower with Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Kremlin-linked lawyer ostensibly about damaging Hillary Clinton material (a meeting that Trump Jr. repeatedly changed his story regarding)
• July 2016: Hackers send stolen emails to WikiLeaks
• July 2016: Trump publicly asks Russia to release emails he suggests may have been stolen from Clinton’s private email server and Russian hackers attempt to access the Clinton server for the first time on the same day
• August 2016: Manafort is fired from Trump campaign

At the very least, that would be an alarming number of coincidences. With Mueller’s team telling a judge that Manafort has failed to live up to the terms of his plea bargain by lying — and they therefore want to pull a deal for a proposed sentence reduction— it’s fair to wonder what caused the special counsel’s startling proclamation. That should be something that takes shape in the coming days and weeks as Mueller’s team fills the court in on exactly what Manafort did.

Also Tuesday, NBC News reported more connections between the Trump team and WikiLeaks.

Two months before WikiLeaks released emails stolen from the Clinton campaign, right-wing conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi sent an email to former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone anticipating the document dump, according to draft court papers obtained by NBC News.

“Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps,” Corsi wrote on Aug. 2, 2016, referring to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, according to the draft court papers. “One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging.”

The two stories combine to tell different links from WikiLeaks — long believed to be an agent the Russian government, including by former CIA director and current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — to Trump.

The connections are very straightforward based on Tuesday’s reports:

• Assange to Manafort to Trump
• Someone in the WikiLeaks sphere to Corsi to Stone to Trump

If either one is true — or any of the other similar plumes of smoke that have emanated from media reports or Mueller probe over the past two years — then Trump’s “no collusion” argument is absolutely obliterated and Trump will be proven to have conspired with a foreign government to undermine American democracy.

Trump seems to be taking the flurry of news with his normal disposition.

677 days in, 785 to go

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