Cambridge Analytica Sent Foreigners to Advise GOP Campaigns

Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix.

Things would seem to be getting worse and worse for the Republican Party as more and more information comes to light about the role that Cambridge Analytic played in Republican campaigns even before the 2016 presidential election.  Specifically, foreigners were involved in advising Republican campaigns in a number of congressional campaigns  across the country even though such activity was illegal.  It's all part of the GOP agenda to win no matter what be it through disenfranchising those perceived to be pro-Democrat to outright flouting the law. The obvious take away is that if this happened in 2014, it is pretty safe to assume that it happened in spades in 2016.  Just as tellingly, Steve Bannon and his ultra-right wing financiers were involved in the 2014 effort.  Note that John Bolton's name also comes up.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at this new development.  Here are highlights:

Cambridge Analytica assigned dozens of non-U.S. citizens to provide campaign strategy and messaging advice to Republican candidates in 2014, according to three former workers for the data firm, even as an attorney warned executives to abide by U.S. laws limiting foreign involvement in elections. Wylie, who emerged this month as a whistleblower, provided The Washington Post with documents that describe a program across several U.S. states to win campaigns for Republicans using psychological profiling to reach voters with individually tailored messages. The documents include previously unreported details about the program, which was called “Project Ripon” for the Wisconsin town where the Republican Party was born in 1854. Those [election law] restrictions were explained in a 10-page memo prepared in July 2014 by a New York attorney, Laurence Levy, for Cambridge Analytica’s leadership at the time, including President Rebekah Mercer, Vice President Stephen K. Bannon and chief executive Alexander Nix. The memo said that foreign nationals could serve in minor roles — for example as “functionaries” handling data — but could not involve themselves in significant campaign decisions or provide high-level analysis or strategy. Many of those employees and contractors were involved in helping to decide what voters to target with political messages and what messages to deliver to them, the former workers said. Their tasks ran the gamut of campaign work, including “managing media relations” as well as fundraising, planning events, and providing “communications strategy” and “talking points, speeches [and] debate prep,” according to a document touting the firm’s 2014 work. “Its dirty little secret was that there was no one American involved in it, that it was a de facto foreign agent, working on an American election,” Wylie said.

Two other former Cambridge Analytica workers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear that they may have violated U.S. law in their campaign work, said concerns about the legality of Cambridge Analytica’s work in the United States were a regular subject of employee conversations at the company, especially after the 2014 vote.

[E]mployees worried the company was giving its foreign employees potentially inaccurate immigration documents to provide upon entering the United States, showing that they were not there to work when they had arrived for the purpose of advising campaigns. “We knew that everything was not above board, but we weren’t too concerned about it,” said one of the former Cambridge Analytica workers, who spent several months in the United States working on Republican campaigns. “It was the Wild West. That’s certainly how they carried on in 2014.” Cambridge Analytica, whose offices were raided over the weekend by British authorities, has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing but did not reply to requests for comment from The Washington Post for this story. Project Ripon was described by Wylie and other workers as an ambitious effort in which Cambridge Analytica would advise American campaigns on how to use data to find “hidden Republicans.” Ripon also was the name of an online campaign management tool designed for the effort and described in a company brochure produced in London that was subtitled, “WINNING BACK AMERICA.” Company documents obtained by The Post show the U.S. program involved a staff of 41 employees and contractors, and spent $7.5 million between April and July 2014. Cambridge Analytica documents show it advised a congressional candidate in Oregon, state legislative candidates in Colorado and, on behalf of the North Carolina Republican Party, the winning campaign for Sen. Thom Tillis. The company, which asserted that Republican candidates won most of the races it worked on in 2014, also provided independent support for candidates in Arkansas, New Hampshire and North Carolina through a super PAC controlled by former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, who was named last week by Trump to be national security adviser. Brett Kappel, a campaign finance lawyer at Akerman LLP, said the accounts of Wylie and the other former Cambridge Analytica workers raises legal concerns. “If Mr. Wylie's allegations are true, the Justice Department could prosecute Cambridge Analytica and its managers for knowing and willful violations of the prohibition on foreign national contributions.” “It would be a problem for a U.S. super PAC — or any other domestic political actor — to have foreign nationals involved in running a political operation, including making decisions on strategy, targeting and expenditures for that political entity,” he said. “If foreigners were involved in the senior levels of decision-making for a political organization, that would be a violation of federal law.” The former Cambridge Analytica workers did not provide information about what transpired in 2016, when the company did work for Cruz and Trump.

The plot just keeps on continuing to thicken.   A piece in The Guardian has details on what may have transpired in 2016 here. 

Mueller Focusing on DOJ Role in Comey Firing

While Roy Moore's much younger wife has been saying that Donald Trump should be thanking her teenage girl loving husband for distracting the media from coverage about Russia, the reality is that the legitimate media is still paying close attention to Robert Mueller's relentless investigation that seems to be moving closer and closer to Der Trumpenführer himself.  A case in point, a piece in New York Magazine that looks at Mueller's focus on the Department of Justice involvement in the firing of James Comey.  Another in Politico looks at Mueller's possible closing in on Michael Flynn who could conceivable be flipped to aid the investigation of Trump himself.  First these highlights from the New York Magazine piece:

Just before firing James Comey, President Trump reportedly drafted a multi-page letter in which he laid out his issues with the FBI director. According to the Washington Post, Trump expressed the he was upset that Comey wouldn’t publicly deny that the FBI’s Russia probe wasn’t focused on him personally.

Now the special counsel’s team is requesting documents that make it sound a lot like they’re looking into whether Trump himself obstructed justice by firing Comey, in addition to all the Russia contacts former campaign officials can’t quite remember.

ABC News reported that in the last month, Mueller’s team requested Justice Department emails and other documents related to the firing of Comey, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from all investigations related to the Russia matter. Muller already sought White House documents related to the FBI director’s dismissal, but this would be the first time he’s directed a records request to the Justice Department – the department in charge of his entire probe. That would include discussions between Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who laid out the reasons Comey should go, and their contacts with the White House.

This, coupled with a recent report that Mueller was preparing to interview Trump’s communications director, Hope Hicks, led some to conclude that the probe is reaching a pivotal moment. . . . . Anytime you can get someone who is the right-hand person or who’s been around the primary target of an investigation, under oath, answering detailed questions, means you’ve progressed very far along in the investigation,” Adam Goldberg, a former Clinton White House lawyer, told Politico.

Sources close to Muller suggested there’s still much work to be done, and legal experts said they expect the probe could last through 2018, and maybe even longer. They note that the trials of two of the three people charged so far, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his business partner Rick Gates, won’t start for months.

“I don’t think there’s any reason to believe this is almost over,” said Randall Eliason, a former federal prosecutor turned George Washington University law professor. “Based not just on what we’ve seen but also what we know about white-collar investigations generally, this seems to me like it is just getting started.”

As for the Politico piece, here are excerpts:

What appear to be obscure details in a court filing against Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, may actually provide clues about what’s next for another target in the special counsel’s Russia investigation: former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Manafort and his business partner Rick Gates were charged late last month with a variety of crimes, including violation of the Foreign Agent Registration Act, or FARA, even though such a charge is rare.

“While criminal charges under FARA are not often brought,” the prosecutors wrote in the passage about why Manafort and Gates were charged with violating the statute, “the facts set forth in the indictment indicate the gravity of the violation at issue based on the dollar volume of earning from the violation, its longevity, its maintenance through creation of a sham entity designed to evade FARA’s requirements, and its continuation through lies to the FARA unit.”

Jeff Cramer, a former federal prosecutor, said: “It’s odd language to have in there. This language could be a precursor to explain any future FARA violation charge, especially Flynn. If Flynn didn’t exist, you wouldn’t need that language in there. … You wouldn’t have to go through a lot of the machinations.”

Flynn’s work could meet part of the Manafort standard that refers to a “sham entity” fronting for a foreign government. . . . Given the criteria set out in the Manafort filing, many lawyers say they expect that if Mueller moves against Flynn, it will involve more sensational charges than simply failing to file a lobbying registration — a charge that jurors might regard as technical even if it survived scrutiny from a judge.

One eye-popping potential charge against Flynn that any juror could readily understand is kidnapping. Reports in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere last week said Flynn attended meetings in September and November in which there was discussion of removing a Turkish dissident, Fethullah Gulen, from the United States, perhaps by force.

A sum of as much as $15 million was allegedly offered to arrange Gulen’s delivery to the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The alleged kidnapping plot was never carried out, but legal experts said charges could be brought under conspiracy laws if any substantial step was taken toward forcibly snatching the dissident.

If prosecutors cut a plea with Flynn, it’s possible the FARA charge could emerge as a relatively mild offense for him to plead guilty to, although it’s still a felony that carries a potential term of up to five years in prison.

Mueller Obtains Search Warrant for Suspicious Foreign Facebook Accounts

This past week Facebook admitted that it had allowed itself to be used by pro-Trump operatives who used the platform to disseminate targeted fake news maligning and disparaging Hillary Clinton.  It increasingly looks as if some of these operatives were foreign agents and the growing question is whether or not they had assistance from Der Trumpenführer's campaign.  More specifically, were Jared Kushner and his agents involved in assisting the careful geographic targeting of the ant-Clinton fake news.  her recent interview, Clinton had some choice comments toward Facebook.  Now, it has been confirmed that special prosecutor has obtained search warrants against some of these dubious Facebook accounts as part of his effort to confirm (i) that foreign agents illegally contributed to the Trump campaign effort, and (ii) whether the Trump campaign colluded with them.  Business Insider looks at the development:

FBI Special Counsel Robert Mueller reportedly obtained a search warrant for records of the "inauthentic" accounts Facebook shut down earlier this month and the targeted ads these accounts purchased during the 2016 election.

The warrant was first disclosed by the Wall Street Journal on Friday night and the news was later confirmed by CNN. Legal experts say the revelation has enormous implications for the trajectory of Mueller's investigation into Russia's election interference, and whether Moscow had any help from President Donald Trump's campaign team.

"This is big news - and potentially bad news for the Russian election interference 'deniers,'" said Asha Rangappa, a former FBI counterintelligence agent. Rangappa, now an associate dean at Yale Law School, explained that to obtain a search warrant a prosecutor needs to prove to a judge that there is reason to believe a crime has been committed. The prosecutor then has to show that the information being sought will provide evidence of that crime.

Mueller would not have sought a warrant targeting Facebook as a company, Rangappa noted. Rather, he would have been interested in learning more about specific accounts.

"The key here, though, is that Mueller clearly already has enough information on these accounts - and their link to a potential crime to justify forcing [Facebook] to give up the info," she said. "That means that he has uncovered a great deal of evidence through other avenues of Russian election interference."

It also means that Mueller is no longer looking at Russia's election interference from a strict counterintelligence standpoint - rather, he now believes he may be able to obtain enough evidence to charge specific foreign entities with a crime.

Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti, now a partner at Thompson Coburn LLP, said that the revelation Mueller obtained a search warrant for Facebook content "may be the biggest news in the case since the Manafort raid."  The Facebook warrant "means that Mueller has concluded that specific foreign individuals committed a crime by making a 'contribution' in connection with an election," Mariotti wrote on Saturday.

"It also means that he has evidence of that crime that convinced a federal magistrate judge of two things: first, that there was good reason to believe that the foreign individual committed the crime. Second, that evidence of the crime existed on Facebook."  That has implications for Trump and his associates, too, Mariotti said. "It is a crime to know that a crime is taking place and to help it succeed. That's aiding and abetting. If any Trump associate knew about the foreign contributions that Mueller's search warrant focused on and helped that effort in a tangible way, they could be charged."

Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, told MSNBC earlier this month that he wants to know how sophisticated the Russian-bought ads were - in terms of their content and targets - to determine whether they had any help from the Trump campaign.  The House Intelligence Committee also wants to interview the digital director for Trump's campaign, Brad Parscale, who worked closely with Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Facebook said in its initial statement that about 25% of the ads purchased by Russians during the election "were geographically targeted," and many analysts have found it difficult to believe that foreign entities would have had the kind of granular knowledge of American politics necessary to target specific demographics and voting precincts.

In a post-election interview, Kushner told Forbes that he had been keenly interested in Facebook's "micro-targeting" capabilities from early on. . . . . "We brought in Cambridge Analytica," he continued. "I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley who were some of the best digital marketers in the world, and I asked them how to scale this stuff . . . We basically had to build a $400 million operation with 1,500 people operating in 50 states, in five months to then be taken apart. We started really from scratch."

 Meanwhile, Politico is reporting this:

An attorney working on the Justice Department's highest-profile money laundering case recently transferred off that assignment in order to join the staff of the special prosecutor investigating the Trump campaign's potential ties to Russia.

Why It is Patriotic to Oppose Trump

Some, as is done in a column in the New York Times, argue that the 2016 presidential election is tainted.  I go a step farther and say that it was stolen as a result of Russian interference and the duplicity of James Comey, the director of the FBI who seemed to deliberately intervene in the election in an unprecedented way with a cleat goal of harming Hillary Clinton's electoral chances.  Hopefully, history will view Comey as a foul and unprincipled figure who put his own ego first and deliberately cause harm to America.  Whatever happens over the next four years, Mr. Trump will never be my president and in my opinion the only thing that a true patriot can do is oppose the man and the coven of extremists who he intends to bring to office.  Here are column highlights:  

The C.I.A., according to The Washington Post, has now determined that hackers working for the Russian government worked to tilt the 2016 election to Donald Trump. This has actually been obvious for months, but the agency was reluctant to state that conclusion before the election out of fear that it would be seen as taking a political role.

Meanwhile, the F.B.I. went public 10 days before the election, dominating headlines and TV coverage across the country with a letter strongly implying that it might be about to find damning new evidence against Hillary Clinton — when it turned out, literally, to have found nothing at all.

Did the combination of Russian and F.B.I. intervention swing the election? Yes. Mrs. Clinton lost three states – Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania – by less than a percentage point, and Florida by only slightly more. If she had won any three of those states, she would be president-elect. Is there any reasonable doubt that Putin/Comey made the difference?

[T]his was a tainted election. It was not, as far as we can tell, stolen in the sense that votes were counted wrong, and the result won’t be overturned. But the result was nonetheless illegitimate in important ways; the victor was rejected by the public, and won the Electoral College only thanks to foreign intervention and grotesquely inappropriate, partisan behavior on the part of domestic law enforcement.

The question now is what to do with that horrifying knowledge in the months and years ahead.

One could, I suppose, appeal to the president-elect to act as a healer, to conduct himself in a way that respects the majority of Americans . . . . What we’re actually getting are wild claims that millions of people voted illegally, false assertions of a landslide, and denigration of the intelligence agencies.

Another course of action, which you’ll see many in the news media taking, is to normalize the incoming administration, basically to pretend that everything is O.K. . . . . however, it’s clear that Mr. Trump — whose personal conflicts of interest are unprecedented, and quite possibly unconstitutional — intends to move U.S. policy radically away from the preferences of most Americans, including a pronounced pro-Russian shift in foreign policy.

In other words, nothing that happened on Election Day or is happening now is normal. Democratic norms have been and continue to be violated, and anyone who refuses to acknowledge this reality is, in effect, complicit in the degradation of our republic.

[Trump] doesn’t deserve deference, he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.

And when, as you know will happen, the administration begins treating criticism as unpatriotic, the answer should be: You have to be kidding. Mr. Trump is, by all indications, the Siberian candidate, installed with the help of and remarkably deferential to a hostile foreign power. And his critics are the people who lack patriotism?

Politics being what it is, moral backbones on Capitol Hill will be stiffened if there are clear signs that the public is outraged by what is happening. And there will be a chance to make that outrage felt directly in two years — not just in congressional elections, but in votes that will determine control of many state governments.

Everything we’ve seen so far says that Mr. Trump is going to utterly betray the interests of the white working-class voters who were his most enthusiastic supporters, stripping them of health care and retirement security, and this betrayal should be highlighted.

This election was an outrage, and we should never forget it.

Trump Foreign Policy Advisor Probed for Ties to Russia

I am of an age where can recall drills in elementary school in particular where students participated in safety drills to prepare for the possibility of a nuclear attack on America and how the basement level of the high school building was a fallout shelter.  The foe that would such an attack, of course was Russia.   Later, I would learn more about Russia and Russian history - an interest sparked in part by having Anna Anderson, perhaps the leading claimant to be Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia,  as a neighbor for two years while in college in Charlottesville (I still do not fully believe supposed DNA proof that she was a fake given the British royal family's history of screwing over Russian relatives).  For the last 99 years, Russia has been ruled by murderous despots.  That trend continues under Vladimir Putin.  And sadly, Russia remains a principal foe of America as has been the case since the fall of the Romanov dynasty other than during the interlude of World War II when the common foe of Hitler and Nazi Germany caused a temporary alliance. 

Now, Russia seems to want a perhaps unholy alliance with America through the vehicle of Donald Trump, a man who likely would like to emulate Putin's dictatorial rule in this country (in Trump's world, I suspect the rest of us exist merely to increase his own perceived magnificence), More frighteningly, for the first time in my memory Russia intelligence and spy services seem poised to try to influence an American presidential election to insure that Trump is elected.  The irony, of course is that Trump supporters view themselves as "real Americans" even as they support a man who likely would sell out American interest to a foreign enemy. A piece at Yahoo News looks at how one of Trump's advisors is under investigation for Russian ties.  Here are highlights:

U.S. intelligence officials are seeking to determine whether an American businessman identified by Donald Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers has opened up private communications with senior Russian officials — including talks about the possible lifting of economic sanctions if the Republican nominee becomes president, according to multiple sources who have been briefed on the issue.

The activities of Trump adviser Carter Page, who has extensive business interests in Russia, have been discussed with senior members of Congress during recent briefings about suspected efforts by Moscow to influence the presidential election, the sources said. After one of those briefings, Senate minority leader Harry Reid wrote FBI Director James Comey, citing reports of meetings between a Trump adviser (a reference to Page) and “high ranking sanctioned individuals” in Moscow over the summer as evidence of “significant and disturbing ties” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin that needed to be investigated by the bureau.

Some of those briefed were “taken aback” when they learned about Page’s contacts in Moscow, viewing them as a possible back channel to the Russians that could undercut U.S. foreign policy, said a congressional source familiar with the briefings but who asked for anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject. The source added that U.S. officials in the briefings indicated that intelligence reports about the adviser’s talks with senior Russian officials close to President Vladimir Putin were being “actively monitored and investigated.”

A senior U.S. law enforcement official did not dispute that characterization when asked for comment by Yahoo News. “It’s on our radar screen,” said the official about Page’s contacts with Russian officials. “It’s being looked at.”

Trump first mentioned Page’s name when asked to identify his “foreign policy team” during an interview with the Washington Post editorial team last March. Describing him then only as a “PhD,” Trump named Page as among five advisers “that we are dealing with.” But his precise role in the campaign remains unclear; Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks last month called him an “informal foreign adviser” who “does not speak for Mr. Trump or the campaign.”

The questions about Page come amid mounting concerns within the U.S. intelligence community about Russian cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee and state election databases in Arizona and Illinois. In a rare public talk this week, former undersecretary of defense for intelligence Mike Vickers said that the Russian cyberattacks constituted meddling in the U.S. election and were “beyond the pale.”

Page came to the attention of officials at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow several years ago when he showed up in the Russian capital during several business trips and made provocative public comments critical of U.S. policy and sympathetic to Putin. “He was pretty much a brazen apologist for anything Moscow did,” said one U.S. official who served in Russia at the time.

Page showed up again in Moscow in early July, just two weeks before the Republican National Convention formally nominated Trump for president, and once again criticized U.S. policy. Speaking at a commencement address for the New Economic School, an institution funded in part by major Russian oligarchs close to Putin, Page asserted that “Washington and other West capitals” had impeded progress in Russia “through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change.”

U.S. officials have since received intelligence reports that during that same three-day trip, Page met with Igor Sechin, a longtime Putin associate and former Russian deputy prime minister who is now the executive chairman of Rosneft, Russian’s leading oil company, a well-placed Western intelligence source tells Yahoo News. That meeting, if confirmed, is viewed as especially problematic by U.S. officials because the Treasury Department in August 2014 named Sechin to a list of Russian officials and businessmen sanctioned over Russia’s “illegitimate and unlawful actions in the Ukraine.”

Trump and Putin must think Americans are fools and idiots.  In the case of Trump's supporters, they are sadly correct in that view.   The "real Americans" are being duped into supporting a man ready to sell out American interests to inflate his own ego and perhaps enrich himself as Putin has done.  Be afraid.

Russia and Trump - The Real Plot Against America

As numerous news outlets are reporting, the latest target of Russian military hackers was the Hillary Clinton campaign.  First the DNC, next the Congressional Democrats and now the Hillary Clinton campaign.  All seemingly to harm those opposed to the Donald Trump's frightening effort to commandeer America and take it down a road toward fascism and tyranny.  My question is this: when will far too many Americans get their heads out of their asses and see the menace that  Trump and today's GOP pose to the nation.  A column in the New York Times looks at the plot against against America.  Here are excerpts:

In retrospect, it worked out much better than planned. Who’d have thought a pariah nation, run by an authoritarian who makes his political opponents disappear, could so easily hijack a great democracy? It didn’t take much. A talented nerd can bring down a minnow of a nation. But this level of political crime requires more refined mechanics — you need everyone to play their assigned roles.

You start with a stooge, a fugitive holed up in London, releasing stolen emails on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, in the name of “transparency.” Cyberburglars rely on a partner in crime to pick up stolen goods. And WikiLeaks has always been there for Russia, a nation with no transparency.

To make the plot work, reporters have to take the bait. On cue, they decry the fact that politics is going on inside a major political party. The horror — Democratic hacks saying nasty things about Senator Bernie Sanders.

Next, lefty extremists have to act like lefty extremists — that is, myopic to the greater good, guided by a Trumpian sense that they alone know how to solve the world’s problems, and everyone else is a sellout.

But Russia still has to seal the deal. Some work remains. If enough angered lefties won’t go for the Democratic nominee, a longtime foe of Vladimir Putin, it will be just enough to put a Putin puppet in the White House. And it would also usher in the term that drove the right wing crazy when George H.W. Bush used it — a New World Order.

What’s in it for Russia? Well, everything. Territory. Hegemony. Its takeover of the Crimean Peninsula has brought sanctions and condemnation from the West. What stands between Putin and further aggression in, say, the Baltic States, is a NATO pact that has kept Europe safe for nearly 70 years. And if you thought Trump stiffed the poor suckers who signed up for his “university,” wait till you see how he treats some of our oldest allies.

Putin despises Hillary Clinton. Like Trump, his skin is rice-paper-thin, albeit a paler shade of orange; and, like Trump, he never forgets a slight. He still hasn’t gotten over Clinton’s comment on George W. Bush’s infamous look into Putin’s soul. As a former K.G.B agent, said Clinton, “he doesn’t have a soul.”

What’s in it for Trump? Help at winning the ultimate throne of his gilded dreams. And maybe some investment money from Russian oligarchs close to Putin, one of many things Trump may be hiding in his tax returns. The two narcissists share a love of torture, authoritarian rule, and women on runways in bathing suits.

But then, a wild card, something unplanned. Putin didn’t expect Trump to be so all-in with his collusion. He knows Trump is a fool, world class in only one thing — ignorance. He doesn’t need spies for that. He knows Trump is a man who will say anything, and deny in the same breath that he ever said it. The Talented Mr. Trump.

So there was the Republican Party nominee for president inviting an American adversary to wage cyberwar against the country he wants to lead. If that wasn’t Trump’s shoot-somebody-on-Fifth-Avenue moment, nothing will be. What’s more, he was way too obvious about the role of the other pawns in the scheme. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press,” he said to Mother Russia.

Also, he’s getting carried away with his dictator-philia. On Thursday, he said Putin was a better leader than President Obama. D’oh! In public, at least, you’re supposed to root for the home team.

But it unfolds, still, if not according to Russia’s design, then according to Russia’s will. Trump is now a national security risk, actively rooting for a foreign adversary to tamper with an American election. And very soon, he will start receiving classified briefings on that adversary.