Lake’s column contains a source that’s quite surprising:

Mike Flynn, who served as Defense Intelligence Agency director between 2012 and 2014 and is an adviser to the Trump campaign, told me he wouldn’t be surprised if the Russians were behind the DNC hack. “Both China and Russia have the full capability to do this,” he said. “If someone were to find out Russia did this I would not be surprised at all.”

Marshall’s column is more ambitious in its allegations:

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At a minimum, Trump appears to have a deep financial dependence on Russian money from persons close to Putin. And this is matched to a conspicuous solicitousness to Russian foreign policy interests where they come into conflict with US policies which go back decades through administrations of both parties. There is also something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of evidence suggesting Putin-backed financial support for Trump or a non-tacit alliance between the two men.

The smoke has gotten thick enough to require a dismissive Trump tweet:

Indeed, this would be laughable on its face in a normal election cycle if it wasn’t for the fact that:

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Donald Trump is the GOP nominee for president; Trump also tweets stuff like this:

So there’s a LOT of smoke. Is there any fire? That is to say, is there any proper causal evidence that Donald J. Trump is a patsy of Vladimir Putin?

No, I don’t see it. Yet.

First of all, let’s dismiss the part of this story that connects folks like Paul Manafort, Carter Page and Mike Flynn to Russia. Those links are there, but they are also irrelevant for the campaign. If there is anything we have learned about Donald Trump’s campaign to date, it’s that non-family underlings don’t matter. Foreign policy advisers like Page or Flynn certainly don’t matter. I’m not saying that these connections are not worth exploring, just that they are not part of some master grand plan.

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Second of all, while the evidence for Russia being behind the DNC hack is certainly suggestive, it’s far from ironclad. Click here, here and here for some critical pushback on these stories. I certainly think the link merits further investigation. But I’m uncomfortable with the ironclad casual assertion that “Russia was behind this” that is starting to form inside the Beltway.

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The third and hardest part of this story to dismiss is the money trail. As Marshall noted, Trump has increased his debt load and the dirty little secret is that most U.S. banks don’t loan money to Trump because they don’t trust him. And as Spoiler Alerts discussed last month, “I’m beginning to wonder if [Trump’s] motivation to win now is less about making America great again and more about avoiding yet another Trump bankruptcy.” Cozying up to Russia and Russian money would certainly be one way of bolstering his finances. And one wonders if the reason that Trump won’t release his tax returns is because it would expose Trump’s reliance on foreign money to prop up his companies.

This story is of a kind as stories that accuse Hilary Clinton of being compromised because of foreign sources of funding for the Clinton Global Initiative. Correlation does not prove causation. Just because funders might want to influence powerful people doesn’t mean that they actually do. Indeed, in some cases the ideological affinity was preexisting. The evidence suggests, for example, that Trump had been enamored with Russia for some time, probably because the plethora of plutocrats there jibe most closely with Trump’s view of how to navigate the world. It’s not like Putin needed to change Trump’s mind on anything — Trump’s headspace was already there.

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All of this justifies further investigative journalism, but I’m queasy with immediately making the leap from “Russia is behind the DNC hack” to “Russia is trying to put a patsy in the White House.” But there are two conclusions I do draw from this ongoing story. The first is that I really wish those writers who have critiqued the Trump-Russia ties were as vigilant and careful when talking about whether Hillary Clinton has been compromised by foreign funding for the Clinton Global Initiative.