Donald Trump has been under siege ever since an old video surfaced earlier this month showing him boasting of sexual assault. But another "October Surprise" -- secrets-revealing website WikiLeaks' rolling release of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and former White House chief of staff John Podesta -- is undercutting Hillary Clinton's campaign and conceivably could put Trump right back on track for the White House.

The Clinton campaign is comparing the hack to the 1970s' Watergate scandal, which started with a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters by operatives for President Richard Nixon. "We're witnessing another effort to steal private campaign documents in order to influence an election," Clinton campaign spokesman Glen Caplin insists. "Only this time, instead of filing cabinets, it's people's emails they're breaking into ... and a foreign government is behind it."

That foreign government is Russia, which appears to have lined up behind Trump's insurgent candidacy.

Trump has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin as "really very much of a leader" and has swung between denying ever having any connection to Putin and claiming to be close with him. He says he and his campaign have nothing to do with the hack.

Trump is prone to conspiracy theories about alleged Clinton corruption, but he steadfastly rejects plausible scenarios that don't fit his worldview. He has refused to accept, for example, the U.S. intelligence community's conclusion that Russia was responsible for the DNC and Podesta hacks, even though the GOP nominee received a classified briefing on the subject. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said Trump's response to the briefing "defies logic."

The Clinton campaign, meanwhile, insists the increasingly belligerent, anti-U.S. Putin regime has good reason to try to prevent the Democratic nominee from winning on Nov. 8. "Putin is trying to put his thumb on the scale through cyber-attacks aimed at influencing the election because he knows that Hillary Clinton will stand up to him," Clinton adviser Jake Sullivan said this week.

If Putin is indeed putting his thumb on the scale, the result might not simply be the carefully timed drip-drip-drip release of hacked emails. Russia's intelligence services are well-known purveyors of disinformation, which means carefully faked emails might be included in the WikiLeaks dumps. After all, the best way to make false information believable is to mix it in with true information.

An example of how successful disinformation campaigns can be comes not from Russia but from "Chris from Massachusetts," a Trump "troll" who recently put out a fake expense report that made it appear that Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Black Panthers, anti-Trump conservative talker Glenn Beck, anti-Trump independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin and the "Sharia Law Center," among others. The Daily Beast reports that a Fox News contributor, a conservative radio host and uncounted Trump backers on social media thought the hoax was real and part of the WikiLeaks release.

And if Chris from Massachusetts can do it, so can more sophisticated players. "The proliferation of information [via the internet] has made it harder for people to judge the accuracy of what they see and read," Washington Post foreign-affairs columnist Anne Applebaum and former Economist magazine Moscow bureau chief Edward Lucas wrote in May. "At the same time, authoritarian regimes, led by Russia but closely followed by China, have begun investing heavily in the production of alternatives [to real news reporting]."

Russia and China's objective, Applebaum and Lucas insisted, is to "undermine the institutions of the West." They highlighted German-government suspicions that Russia has tried to foment anti-immigrant fervor in Germany, in one case by pushing a fake story about a girl being raped by a refugee.

Russia's disinformation efforts might be even more effective in the U.S., Applebaum and Lucas believe. "Partly because the U.S. media market is so vast, there is still little understanding of how disinformation campaigns work here," they wrote.

So are the Russians mixing in fake emails with real ones in the WikiLeaks dumps? We just don't know. The possibility that they are is one reason the Clinton campaign is refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the emails that have been released. (Another possible reason is, of course, politically motivated obfuscation.)

"You can't assume that they're all accurate," Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Kaine said on Sunday. "One of the emails that came up this week referred to me. It was completely inaccurate. And I don't know whether it was inaccurate because the sender didn't know what he or she was talking about or it had been doctored."

He added:

"Anybody who is going to try to cyber-attack and then try to destabilize an election, you can't trust that they're going to maintain scrupulous honesty about the content of what they're dumping out for the world to see."

There is, however, at least one good reason to believe the WikiLeaks docs so far have been legit: there's been no smoking gun. The released documents, writes Time magazine's Joe Klein, "represent one of the most reassuring moments of this calamitous campaign. The overwhelming impression is of the candidate's and her staff's competence and sanity -- and something more: a refreshing sense of reality about the vagaries of politics."

Meanwhile, conspiracy theories from the Trump camp continue. Here's unofficial Trump adviser Roger Stone, referring to the fact that WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange has been hiding out at Ecuador's London embassy for the past four years to avoid Swedish prosecution on rape allegations:

-- Douglas Perry