Don Jr in the spotlight again

It looks like the Trump-Russia story is going to drip out piece by piece.  It's a hell of a complex plot. Who will be in the movie?

Just before the stroke of midnight on September 20, 2016, at the height of last year’s presidential election, the WikiLeaks Twitter account sent a private direct message to Donald Trump Jr., the Republican nominee’s oldest son and campaign surrogate. “A PAC run anti-Trump site putintrump.org is about to launch,” WikiLeaks wrote. “The PAC is a recycled pro-Iraq war PAC. We have guessed the password. It is ‘putintrump.’ See ‘About’ for who is behind it. Any comments?”

  The Atlantic

The address is putintrump.org and the password is putintrump?*  How very secure.  And are they inviting Junior to hack a website?  Did he?  Come on, it's characterized as "anti-Trump", so you know he did.  Or someone on the campaign did.  That will be another crime for the Mueller team.

The site, which has since become a joint project with Mother Jones, was founded by Rob Glaser, a tech entrepreneur, and was funded by Progress for USA Political Action Committee.

A tech entrepeneur? And there was no one involved who knew how to create a secure password? I have to think they wanted it to be hacked.

The next morning, about 12 hours later, Trump Jr. responded to WikiLeaks. “Off the record I don’t know who that is, but I’ll ask around,” he wrote on September 21, 2016. “Thanks.”

The [leaked] messages [...] 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.

Bizarre. Was everybody out to take advantage of the novice campaign? Junior posted some of the emails after this story came out. Does he not have a lawyer?

Ironic?

Junior's so stupid I'm surprised he didn't do it. Or, did he?  If that was him, he wouldn't have done it without Trump's permission.

Though Trump Jr. mostly ignored the frequent messages from WikiLeaks, he at times appears to have acted on its requests. When WikiLeaks first reached out to Trump Jr. about putintrump.org, for instance, Trump Jr. followed up on his promise to “ask around.” According to a source familiar with the congressional investigations into Russian interference with the 2016 campaign, who requested anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, on the same day that Trump Jr. received the first message from WikiLeaks, he emailed other senior officials with the Trump campaign, including Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Brad Parscale, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, telling them WikiLeaks had made contact. Kushner then forwarded the email to campaign communications staffer Hope Hicks. 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.

UPDATE:

Ha.  Poor Dana.  Now he knows why they kept ignoring his pleas.

FURTHER UPDATE:

Assange believes in nothing but himself. He’d sell Junior to the Somali pirates if he thought that would advantage him in some way. No game is worth that candle. And you can see how desperately WikiLeaks wanted to keep Junior on the string. (That request for the president*’s tax returns, so that WikiLeaks could publish them and thereby establish a neutral bona fides for future anti-Clinton news dumps, is positively Machiavellian—and it would’ve worked, too.) And now, in another perfectly predictable development, those emails are in the hands of congressional investigators. Apologies, again, to Eric Trump, who heretofore will be known as The Smart One.

  Charles P Pierce

*FURTHER UPDATE: Mother Jones explains more of the story, including why the password was what it was:

The password did not allow anyone access to the back end of the site; it was intended simply to let the press preview the site as it would look the following day, when it went live.

  Mother Jones