Oh snap!
Via Rawstory.
The Democratic National Committee on Friday filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit accusing the Trump campaign of colluding with WikiLeaks and the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
The Washington Post reports that the lawsuit, which was filed in a federal district court in Manhattan, claims that Trump’s campaign encouraged Russia to illegally hack the emails of Democrats, while also conspiring to help Russian agents spread and disseminate the leaked communications.
“During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy, and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trump’s campaign,” DNC Chairman Tom Perez said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “This constituted an act of unprecedented treachery: the campaign of a nominee for President of the United States in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the presidency.”
The lawsuit does not name Trump as a defendant. Instead, it names people within the Trump campaign who were known to have had contacts with Russian officials who promised them dirt on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, such as Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and George Papadopoulos.
This is pretty major and could be entirely based on public reports without requiring anything currently in the Mueller investigation.
Public reports already exist showing that Trump himself personally conspired with George Papadopoulos to setup a face-to-face meeting with Putin.
Marianna Kakaounaki, an investigative reporter for the Greek newspaper Kathimerini, said Papadopoulos told her that Trump called him personally after he was hired to the campaign in March 2016. Trump later met with Papadopoulos one-on-one, when the aide told Trump about his ongoing efforts to set up a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kakaounaki said.
He didn’t keep this a secret he actually emailed other members of the campaign about it.
Three days after Donald Trump named his campaign foreign policy team in March 2016, the youngest of the new advisers sent an email to seven campaign officials with the subject line: “Meeting with Russian Leadership - Including Putin.”
The adviser, George Papadopoulos, offered to set up “a meeting between us and the Russian leadership to discuss US-Russia ties under President Trump,” telling them his Russian contacts welcomed the opportunity, according to internal campaign emails read to The Washington Post.
Papadopoulos came back to report the progress of his efforts with the Russians and his attempts to setup a meeeting with Putin onto to have that idea shut down by Jeff Sessions. Or maybe he didn’t and just said “don’t tell anyone about this.”
None-the-less, he continued and In April Papadopoulos sent multiple emails to other members of the campaign about his efforts to “reach out” to the Russians, the responses back were very encouraging. “Great Work, George” as documented in the plea document for Papadopoulos.
George made continued with professor Joseph Mifsud, a Russian government official linked to their Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) and a woman claiming to be Putin's Niece. Eventually Mifsud told him the Russian’s had “thousands of Hillary's emails” and gave him a preview of what releasing those emails might look like.
Papdopoulos reported this back to the campaign as we now know because he has since said that Sessions told him to find out as much as he could about the “Hillary Dirt.”
Papadopoulos, according to this new acquaintance, said that Sessions was well aware of the contact between Papadopoulos and Joseph Mifsud, an academic from Malta with high-level connections in Russia. Papadopoulos’ indictment revealed that Mifsud had told Papadopoulos that the Russians had “‘dirt’ on then-candidate Hillary Clinton in the form of ‘thousands of emails.'”
This establishes largely what the DNC suit alleges. Multiple people involved in the Trump campaign starting with Papadopoulos and Sessions, then later extending to Carter Page who was also told about the “dirt on Hillary” while visiting Moscow, Don Jr. who met with Russians inside Trump Tower in an attempt to “get dirt on Hillary”, then also met with Russian gangster and government official Alexander Torshin at an NRA event and Paul Manafort along with Rick Gates were in fairly regular contact during the campaign with their business associate Konstantin Kilimnik who was a former member of Russian Military Intelligence (GRU) were all in contact with Russians.
That places all of them Papadopoulos, Sessions, Carter Page, Don Jr., Manafort and Gates involved in the conspiracy with various Russians while they had hacked the DNC, then later hacked John Podesta and the Clinton Foundation.
Except for Don Jr’s communications Wikileaks and Page’s trip to Moscow all of this happened before the WaPo first reported the DNC hack or the Intelligence Community officially announced the involvement by Russia in the hack, and even before some of the hacks had even happened and they began to be released by Wikileaks.
I think they might, at this point, have a hard time proving that the Trumpsters “encouraged Russia to illegally hack the emails of Democrats” except for that time the Trump said that Russia should “find Hillary’s deleted emails” but other than that they’ve got a pretty strong case.
In fact, they could very easily include Trump personally in the suit since he personally authorized everything that Papadopoulos ultimately did.