Donald Trump Jr gets himself tangled with Julian Assange and Russia

| 7:08 pm EDT August 19, 2017
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Donald Trump Jr is already in legal trouble for his 2016 meeting with representatives of the Russian government in the hope of obtaining dirt on Hillary Clinton. Now for some reason Junior has inserted himself in a new scandal involving Russia, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and notoriously Kremlin-linked Republican Congressmen Dana Rohrabacher. The story is confusing, but it’s playing out in real time and appears to be crucial.

Dana Rohrabacher is such an infamous Kremlin puppet that even his fellow Republican Congressman Kevin McCarthy accused him last year during a closed-door meeting of being on Vladimir Putin’s payroll (link). This week Rohrabacher decided to up the ante by meeting with his fellow Russian puppet Julian Assange on Wednesday, according to the Los Angeles Times (link). Rohrabacher is inexplicably boasting about the meeting, even though it’ll likely place him under federal investigation for Russian collusion, if he isn’t already. But it’s what happened next that’s key.

One day after the Rohrabacher-Assange meeting took place, Foreign Policy reported that Assange’s WikiLeaks had turned down an opportunity to publish leaks during the 2016 election that would have been damaging to the Kremlin (link). Assange’s allegiance to the Kremlin has long been obvious, but this finally proves that WikiLeaks has been going out of its way to protect Putin’s government from its own corruption. The timing raises questions. Did Assange meet with Rohrabacher to try to prevent this story from coming out, or to plot a counter narrative? But then Donald Trump Jr got himself involved.

One day after the news broke that WikiLeaks had been protecting Putin all along, and two days after Rohrabacher met with Assange, Donald Trump Jr decided to begin following Assange on Twitter (link). As of today, Junior is still following Assange. Considering that Junior is already being investigated for colluding with the Russian government, this wasn’t the brightest move. But was it merely an idiotically timed whimsical decision on his part, or did he just carelessly tip off that he’s involved in this unfolding Rohrabacher-WikiLeaks-Kremlin storyline? This is all bizarre, and there’s more to come.