September 8, 2016: Sessions has a secret meeting with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in which the two men discuss the dropping of U.S. sanctions on Russia.
September 9, 2016: Russian bots begin a 60-day campaign of retweeting Donald Trump 500,000 times.
UNROLLED:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/957537773300396032.html
2/ According to Twitter, nearly 5% of *all* retweets of Donald Trump in the two months before the 2016 presidential election were by Russian bots.
3/ As a further point of reference, Don Jr. began his communication with WikiLeaks—as far as we know—on September 21, under two weeks after Russia's campaign to support Trump on Twitter via bots began. It was at this same time that Trump began using WikiLeaks in his stump speech.
4/ Trump received his first security briefing as a candidate—which confirmed for him that Russia was waging cyber-war against the United States on a massive scale—on August 17, 2016.
That was the *latest* date at which he—and family and aides—learned Russia was a hostile actor.
5/ George Papdopoulos gave an interview to Russian media implying Trump wanted to drop sanctions on September 30—three weeks after Sessions met with Kislyak and Russia began its Twitter campaign supporting Trump, and about a week after Don Jr. began corresponding with WikiLeaks.
6/ Papadopoulos' girlfriend says that her understanding from Papadopoulos is that—presumably with the exception of an early-campaign gaffe involving UK media—every action Papadopoulos took abroad with respect to meetings and interviews was with the blessing of the Trump campaign.
7/ If Donald Trump beginning to use the word "WikiLeaks" in nearly every campaign speech truly had nothing to do with the fact that his son—one of his chief political advisors—had just begun a communication with them, it's one of the great coincidences in U.S. political history.
8/ And if Donald Trump Jr. was willing to tell his dad about communicating with WikiLeaks at the time it was happening but *not* willing to tell his dad about communicating with Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya at the time *that* happened, it's another historic coincidence.
9/ It'd be especially rich if Trump felt so warmly about Russia that on July 27, 2016 he could publicly invite them to commit crimes against American citizens, even as his own son was—for reasons passing human understanding—unwilling to tell his dad that he'd met with a Russian.
10/ The good news is the world makes sense, none of this was coincidental, Trump was coordinating with the Russians and the ice-cream headache we've all been getting trying to imagine *some way* that he *couldn't* have been coordinating with the Russians is totally needless. /end
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