PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA—Back during the late Avignon Presidency, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noticed something hinky going on at the Department of Justice regarding the appointment and dismissal of various U.S. Attorneys around the country. So he dug around, stayed with the story and, eventually, it blew up as a legitimate scandal that touched not only the DOJ but also provided a window into the phony "voter fraud" campaigns that lie behind various voter-suppression schemes that continue to plague the country. Since then, when Marshall gets his teeth into something, the rest of us should start to pay attention, and right now he's onto the strange collusion between He, Trump and Vladimir Putin, and he is sounding a fire bell in the night, to borrow the image used by local Philadelphia transient Thomas Jefferson to describe slavery.

In brief: In his business dealings, He, Trump seems increasingly dependent on money from Russia and from the former Soviet republics within its increasingly active sphere of influence. This is because most of the big banks on this side of the pond won't go near him without HazMat suits. (Gee, could it be that his sudden emergence as a Warren-esque crusader against the "rigged system" of the banksters is less of a principled opposition and simply pure animal vengeance? Unpossible!) As Marshall points out, this isn't exactly a deep corporate secret, as The Washington Post explained:

Trump has conveyed a different view, informed in part through his business ambitions. Since the 1980s, Trump and his family members have made numerous trips to Moscow in search of business opportunities, and they have relied on Russian investors to buy their properties around the world. "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets," Trump's son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. "We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia."

The dynamic illustrates the extent to which Trump's worldview has been formed through the lens of commerce rather than the think tanks, government deliberations and international diplomatic conferences that typically shape the foreign policy positions of presidential candidates. It also reflects Trump's willingness to see world leaders through his own personal connections. In a Republican Party in which an ability to stand up to Putin has been seen as a test of toughness, Trump's relationship with the Russian leader is instead one of mutual flattery. Putin said in December that Trump was a "colorful and talented" person, a compliment that Trump said at the time was an "honor."

There is no question that Putin is more than a little supportive of the rise of right-wing authoritarian politics in Europe, much of it based in the same dynamics that are powering the Trump campaign in this country. (The latest stirrings come from Serbia, which should surprise approximately nobody. The ruling party there is currently literally hanging inconvenient journalists out to dry. In America, this would be referred to as "opening up the libel laws," I guess.)

Marshall presents a judicious but comprehensive bill of indictment as regards He, Trump's relationship with Putin. He doesn't allege direct complicity, only a mutuality of interest that should alarm anyone concerned about the stability of American democracy. He also carefully traces the connections to Russia of several of He, Trump's crucial advisors. (I knew about Paul Manafort's connection to Putin's Ukrainian marionette, but the relationship that Carter Page, one of the campaign's key foreign-policy advisers, to Gazprom, the Russian energy behemoth that Putin controls, was a new one for me.) He shies away from the more baroque conspiracy theories, although I don't think the notion that Russian intelligence was behind the hack-and-release of 20,000 internal DNC e-mails at exactly the right time is that far-fetched.

This should be the only story about the Trump campaign until he comes clean. It should be the only question anybody asks him. Frankly, even beyond the threat to this election, it's a measure of the pure arrogance of He, Trump. And if Trump thinks his ability to game the American real-estate market, and his success at swindling the rubes who signed up for Trump University, makes him ready to deal with a guy who managed to survive a career at the top-level of the KGB only to make himself the presiding autocrat of the world's leading kleptocracy, I'd like to be there when he finds out how wrong he is.

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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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