Fascinating, convoluted and really complicated story today in The Guardian. The gist is that top Putin-aligned oligarch Oleg Deripaska’s U.S. lobbyist, Adam Waldman, met repeatedly in 2017 with Julian Assange at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. Deripaska is Manafort’s guy. Or rather, Paul was Deripaska’s guy. He was the one Manafort was offering private briefings to when he was riding high as Trump’s campaign manager in the summer of 2016. He was also the one Manafort owed some $20 million to and who wanted to collect his debt. Waldman met repeatedly with Assange over the course of 2017, with meetings heavily weighted toward the first months of the year.