The Layers of trump-Russia Treachery

Treachery, though at first very cautious, in the end betrays itself.
-- Livy, Annales XLIV

The latest regarding our long descent down the Darkest Timeline: Mueller's Washington DC grand jury issued 12 indictments against Russian agents - at least one confirmed GRU (post-KGB) officer - involved in hacking various individuals and organizations tied into the Democratic Party.

We're talking actual criminal charges here, in which illegal acts were committed against Americans by a foreign power.

We're talking establishing evidence that the Russians managed a committed campaign to subvert our nation's electoral process.

Let's have Adam L Silverman from Balloon Juice talk a bit about this now:

Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein just announced indictments of twelve Russian intelligence officers for hacking the DNC, the DCCC, and others on the Clinton campaign, stealing data, and then weaponizing it on behalf of Putin’s active measures and cyberwarfare campaign to harm Secretary Clinton’s campaign in order to promote the President’s campaign. Rosenstein also made it clear that he briefed the President on this earlier in the week, which explains why he was at the White House before the President left for the NATO summit. DAG Rosenstein, in his announcement today, took a swipe at the GOP members of Congress, as well as conservative commentators, who have been trying to downplay Putin’s activities or outright trying to get the Special Counsel’s investigation stopped through a variety of means, by emphasizing that this was an attack on the US and the response transcends partisanship...

Unfortunately, as this week's Republican House attack on FBI agent Strzok proved, the Republicans are so sunk into their partisan Narrative that they will not rise to the challenge of fixing this catastrophe, they will in fact dive into the mire and revel in it. Back to Silverman:

First, if you’ve been watching what the Special Counsel has been doing, this makes sense. Simply put he has method, not madness. His first indictment of nineteen Russian nationals set up this indictment about who actually stole the information. This indictment, like the one that preceded it, is setting up the next one. Special Counsel Mueller is working methodically to build not just a set of related cases, but to have the indictments and the cases tell his narrative of what happened...

What Mueller is trying to do is create a Narrative as well, but one based on evidence where the foundations of the case are solid enough to handle the many layers getting piled onto it. No matter how trump and his Republican lackeys will try to shill their alternate fact-free version of events in the court of partisan media, Mueller has a reality-based version that will stand where it matters: the court of law.

As Silverman notes, having established the Russians had the means (operatives on social media performing psych-ops campaigns to mess with the public mindset) Mueller is now establishing opportunity (all the hacking attacks) and shades of motive (wanting trump to win). While these indictments haven't named any Americans actively engaged in the criminal acts - even with all the stories the news media have uncovered suggested there were a good number of Republicans who did - these indictments ARE creating links to them for the next round of indictments (depending on when trump/GOP tries one more time to shut the grand juries down).

In particular, there's a part of the grand jury evidence involving a still-unnamed person highly ranked in the trump campaign interacting with Russian hackers who operated under pseudonym Guccifer 2.0: Based on earlier reporting, that evidence strongly points at Roger Stone. The odds of being a target of the next layer of indictments is going up on Stone, because that's how these investigations work from the outside in. So far, trump has been able to bluff "no collusion" because Mueller hasn't come out with direct links between trump and Russian hackers. With Stone - a key trump ally for years, as well as a major dark figure in Republican politics - Mueller can create that direct link.

Another part of Mueller's indictments involves one of the key moments in the trump-Russia scandal: The day - July 27, 2016 - trump went public at a press conference openly asking Russian hackers to do him a solid and get Hillary's "missing" emails. While a good lawyer could argue coincidence, the fact that within that day Russian hackers intentionally broke into her email account looks very much like a smoking gun of collusion (or even conspiracy). trump's outburst could well have been a flag to his Russian buddies to do his dirty work for him.

One last thing to note about Mueller's indictments against the Russians: It wasn't just the trump campaign profiting from the illegal hacks. Investigators uncovered at least one Republican political operative - still unnamed, but there's strong hints about who it is - working with the hackers, and also one Congressional candidate (or his campaign) actively reaching out to the hackers to get stolen documents to use in dirty tricks campaigning.

When you add in the reports of a key GOP funding group - the goddamn NRA - funneling Russian money into Republican campaign coffers, you start seeing the shape of an entire party eagerly working with a foreign power to cheat and subvert our elections.

Mueller is adding the layers to this scandal. We're starting to see the shape of it.

And Gods help us, it's looking more and more like a lot of Republicans were in on this scandal than they would care to confess to... even as the Republicans double-down on their denials and evasions.