Don Jr.'s Supercool Correspondence with Wikileaks

Julia Ioffe at the Atlantic: The Secret Correspondence Between Donald Trump Jr. and Wikileaks.

The messages, obtained by The Atlantic, were also turned over by Trump Jr.'s lawyers to congressional investigators. They are part of a long—and largely one-sided—correspondence between Wikileaks and the president's son that continued until at least July 2017.

The messages show Wikileaks, a radical transparency organization that the American intelligence community believes was chosen by the Russian government to disseminate the information it had hacked, actively soliciting Trump Jr.'s cooperation.

Wikileaks made a series of increasingly bold requests, including asking for Trump's tax returns, urging the Trump campaign on Election Day to reject the results of the election as rigged, and requesting that the president-elect tell Australia to appoint Julian Assange ambassador to the United States.

...Though Trump Jr. mostly ignored the frequent messages from Wikileaks, he at times appears to have acted on its requests. ...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.

Everything documented here is incredible, but I think my favorite part is Wikileaks trying to convince Don Jr. to allow Wikileaks to publish Donald Trump's tax returns, because "it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality. 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."

It's so brazen. Just breathtakingly brazen.

We've now updated the story with @ByronTau's great catch: @realDonaldTrump tweeted about the release of Podesta's emails *15 minutes* after @Wikileaks wrote to @DonaldJTrumpJr about it. https://t.co/pVGEBqmB9O pic.twitter.com/pOszShJ7JY

— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) November 13, 2017

I'm certainly not surprised by any of the disclosures here; that the Trump campaign was coordinating with Wikileaks was pretty evident, even with just a cursory comparison of their respective Twitter accounts at the time. But it's solid corroboration.

This presidency is illegitimate. Here is yet more proof.