Josh Marshall of TPM has just published a story on the secret channel between Trump and the Russian government in which he notes that, “It now appears fairly clear that some arm of the Russian government conducted an aggressive campaign of cyber-espionage against one US political party and used the material to assist Trump's presidential campaign.”
Marshall also points out that, “Such an effort to manipulate a US election by a hostile foreign government is all but unprecedented. For all the chatter about the subject, there's been very little wrestling with the implications of this in reporting on the US presidential election. When you put it together with Trump's close support of Russian government policies on almost every front, his financial ties to Russian, and the number of close advisors with close ties to Putin and his allies, it's more than enough to ring every alarm bell.”
If they are, if Russia has coopted or cultivated or compromised Trump that is a threat of the highest order