Julia Ioffe of The Atlantic has broken an amazingly detailed story about Donald Trump, Jr. and how haplessly he leaped at the poisoned bait dangled by WikiLeaks and its proprietor, fugitive sex-crime defendant Julian Assange. In short, in our assessment of the president*’s valueless spalpeens, we all may owe Eric an apology for calling him the dumb one, because Junior pretty plainly is as dumb as the stumps on which he poses.

Assange sized this hungry fish up with a master’s eye. At which point, he pretty much shot the moon.

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.

I’d say that last one had only about a 60-percent chance of happening.

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.

Modern McCarthyism! The more I think about it, the more I come to believe that Assange is not a neutral participant in the whole project of creating a new paradigm for information and global knowledge in the hopes of making this a better world. Or as Himself put it on the electric Twitter machine, with his usual sub-Utopian wha-dee-doo-dah:

If you actually had taken 3 minutes to be a journalist like you claim to be you would know: to generate a transformative discussion about corrupt media, corrupt PACs and primary corruption.

Boy, is that all my balls.

Two minutes later, Trump Jr. wrote again, asking, “What’s behind this Wednesday leak I keep reading about?” The day before, Roger Stone, an informal advisor to Donald Trump, had tweeted, Wednesday@HillaryClinton is done. #WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks didn’t respond to that message, but on October 12, 2016, the account again messaged Trump Jr. “Hey Donald, great to see you and your dad talking about our publications,” WikiLeaks wrote. (At a rally on October 10, Donald Trump had proclaimed, “I love WikiLeaks!”)

That’s just beyond adorable. But then, it was time to get down to some serious ratfcking.

“Hi Don if your father ‘loses’ we think it is much more interesting if he DOES NOT conceed [sic] and spends time CHALLENGING the media and other types of rigging that occurred—as he has implied that he might do,” WikiLeaks wrote at 6:35pm, when the idea that Clinton would win was still the prevailing conventional wisdom. (As late as 7:00pm that night, FiveThirtyEight, a trusted prognosticator of the election, gave Clinton a 71 percent chance of winning the presidency.) WikiLeaks insisted that contesting the election results would be good for Trump’s rumored plans to start a media network should he lose the presidency. “The discussion can be transformative as it exposes media corruption, primary corruption, PAC corruption, etc.,” WikiLeaks wrote.

Ioffe makes it clear that Junior didn’t respond to this email, but anyone who listened to the Trump campaign down the stretch cannot doubt that this suggestion was a strategy that appealed to it. The candidate leaned hard into “fake news” and “fake polls,” and he was already raving about the millions of undocumented immigrants who were going to vote against him. They were prepared to scorch the earth if the election went narrowly against them.



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In this, of course, the president* wasn’t planning to do anything that Republicans before him had not done. After all, in 2000, among other escapades, the party flew in congressional aides to disrupt a perfectly legal recount being conducted in Dade County and, a month or so later, many of these same people were celebrated at a Washington fundraising gala. As we have to make clear, over and over, Trump did not come out of nowhere. He is an inevitable consequence of modern conservative Republican politics, not an aberration of them.

“Hi Don if your father ‘loses’ we think it is much more interesting if he DOES NOT conceed [sic]."

To get back to Junior, however, how stupid do you have to be to get involved even marginally in something like this? 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.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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