The New York Times reports that in the latest release of Clinton documents, billionaire donors to the Clinton Foundation tried to curry favors from a responsive State Department when Hillary Clinton was U.S. secretary of State. That gambit is known as the “pay-to-play” scandal. Give the foundation a big fat donation, and Hillary will open whatever door you need opened. In fact, as secretary, she approved a now-famous deal that granted the Russians control over 20 percent of uranium production here in the United States.

Despite all of this, Hillary, as usual, got off scot-free. But while she may think she’s got smooth sailing ahead, she needs to consider the albatross dangling from her neck. The latest emails handed over to Judicial Watch, which sued over spurned or ignored Freedom of Information Act requests, are very revealing. As in “The Rime of the Mariner,” she may well find no wind in her sails when highly damaging Clinton Foundation information is made public. Julian Assange, true to his promise to release new material about the Clintons, did so most recently on the international classified information-leaking website WikiLeaks on August 8.

Therein lies the real rub for Hillary Clinton and the United States if, as alluded to, Russia is WikiLeaks’ source of what’s being released now. Assange, WikiLeaks’s founder and editor-in-chief, may become the nemesis who could scuttle Hillary’s bid for the White House. Certainly, there’s no love lost between them. Hillary has been pushing hard for Assange’s extradition to the United States on, ironically, espionage charges (which she escaped) and wants WikiLeaks torn off the web.

In response, Assange told CNN on August 1, “We have quite a lot of material (from the DNC, the Clinton campaign and the Clinton Foundation), so I think we will stagger it in different batches when we are ready to publish each batch.” That gives all of us a not-so-subtle clue about his intentions. It’s clear he will publish information in ways that manifest as “data-driven IEDs.” They’ll be set to detonate at pivotal points during the campaign, such as prior to the debates. But his Trump card—pun intended—could more likely play out as an “October Surprise.”

An Adversary with Sights on Our Presidential Election

If Assange is getting his material from Russia and sabotaging Hillary’s campaign, that takes the pending releases up a whole bunch of notches. It means a prickly and powerful adversary is trying to rig our presidential election, and that’s unaccaptable.

In an interview posted on YouTube on July 27, Assange contends the next “batches of postings” will get Hillary Clinton arrested. Some of those emails have been posted on WikiLeaks and it is possible they contain some damning information.

For Hillary, the “fix” appears to be in universally, but freedom of the press gives Assange more power than all other news outlets currently carrying her water. She’s a candidate not without a significant amount of baggage to begin with, and she’s a poor campaigner. She needs all the help she can get, and no trouble. If WikiLeaks posts something in October so devastating that Hillary becomes completely compromised, it may be too late for her to bow out of the race. Instead, she’ll have face a McGovernesque loss.

It can be safely assumed the Russians do have a very large data dump that could ruin both Clintons, and they could have passed it along to Assange.

While we as conservatives should find this a fitting end to Hillary Clinton’s political career, Putin is by no means a friend of the United States. It’s clear that he is cold, calculating, and longs for the halcyon days of the U.S.S.R., as few as they may have been. Putin may be thinking it will be easier to deal with Trump than with Hillary.

He likely envisions a meeting not unlike the one at which Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev ate President John F. Kennedy’s lunch in Vienna. Back then, JFK opined, “It’s going to be a cold winter.” If the Russians give Assange all they have on Hillary, the result could be a career-ending October surprise and a very cold and endless winter for Hillary Rodham Clinton.

This article was edited to remove speculative comments about the Seth Rich case, which should not have been included in the original piece. The Federalist regrets the error.