Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced a suite of new charges against Russian intelligence operatives for their role in 2016 election hacking on Friday. The indictment is the latest to emerge from the Russia probe now helmed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which even before today had produced 79 criminal charges against 20 people and three companies, with five guilty pleas and one person sentenced. The move was immediately significant because it comes the day before Donald Trump, American president, is set to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But the real fireworks came after Rosenstein's press conference, when the actual indictment document dropped. Reporters dug into it and immediately uncovered two shocking new findings.

First, there's the Candidate for U.S. Congress:

This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

So an American candidate for federal office reached out to Guccifer 2.0, an alias used by Russian hacking conspirators, and asked for stolen documents in order to sway an American election. The candidate then received those documents. It looks like someone who may well be serving in the United States Congress at this very moment was intimately and knowingly involved in a conspiracy in order to get elected. It's not yet clear whether they knew they were conspiring with agents of a hostile foreign power.

The other tidbit comes via Washington Post reporter Christopher Ingraham:

This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

July 27, 2016, Trump: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing."

Indictment: That evening, Russian operatives targeted Clinton campaign emails "for the first time." pic.twitter.com/fanyaAxwfJ — Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) July 13, 2018

So Trump's call for Russia to hack his opponent during the election—which his defenders dismissed as a "joke"—was taken very seriously indeed by Russian hackers. He asked them to, and they did. If you are not yet convinced something went very, very wrong in the 2016 election, you might ask yourself whether at this point you'd be perfectly fine with the president shooting someone on Fifth Avenue.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io