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What you will not have been let in on is that the attack on Freeland began with dirty insinuations that first entered circulation in a collaboration between two men who are known to have teamed up in the past on what you might call Kremlin-friendly smear campaigns. One of the men is an eccentric Moscow-based freelancer, John Helmer. Back in the 1980s, in Washington, D.C., Helmer found himself at the centre of a maelstrom of allegations that he was a KGB asset. He left for Russia almost immediately thereafter, and has worked in Moscow ever since. The other man is the notorious far-right Luxembourg-based Polish “analyst,” Stanislas Balcerac.

Believe what you like, but the Washington Post and its reporters were not faking it last November when they enumerated dozens and dozens of botnets, “useful idiot” webzines, teams of paid trolls and social-media networks devoted to the purposes of a clandestine Russian propaganda campaign aimed at undermining American democracy and casting the garish billionaire outsider Donald Trump in the most favourable light during the final convulsions of the American presidential campaign.

Here’s a quick summation of what a cavalier inattention to Moscow’s dirty work ended up doing to America:

Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser, resigned last month after it was revealed that he’d misled Vice-President Mike Pence about his contacts with Russian officials. Flynn’s departure followed the forced dumping of Trump campaign chairman Paul Monafort and Trump advisers Roger Stone and Carter Page, all three of whom are now under FBI investigation for their unseemly relationships with Kremlin officials and shadowy Russian bankers. The FBI is continuing its probe of the hacking of the Democratic Party’s computer system, which several U.S. intelligence agencies have pinned on Russia.