Mr. Trump and his associates might have thought that Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, was just being a mischievous scamp, not passing along communications stolen by Russian intelligence, most of which came from the hacker Guccifer 2.0, an online persona created by Russian military intelligence officers. Mr. Stone said in 2017 that he had carried out “completely innocuous” private Twitter exchanges with Guccifer 2.0 during the presidential campaign.

But then why did Mr. Trump say, five days after the first WikiLeaks release, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

And might not the Trump circle have suspected that WikiLeaks was working with Russia after Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and the campaign chairman Paul Manafort met at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, with Russians who were peddling dirt on Mrs. Clinton?

And if Mr. Trump’s first F.B.I. intelligence briefing on Aug. 17, 2016, included a warning about Russian espionage, as NBC News reported in 2017, why didn’t Mr. Trump or anyone else in the campaign tell the agents about the meeting or the suspicious release of emails?

After the first WikiLeaks release, the indictment says, “a senior Trump Campaign official was directed” — presumably by someone even more senior — to contact Mr. Stone about what dirt the group had on the Clinton campaign. If the Trump campaign had not known that it was getting dirt from Russia, why did George Papadopoulos, a campaign adviser whom Mr. Trump called “an excellent guy,” plead guilty to lying about his contact with a professor who said he had dirt from Russia on Mrs. Clinton? (Mr. Papadopoulos’s lawyer said his client had taken his cues from Mr. Trump, and that “the president of the United States hindered this investigation more than George Papadopoulos ever could.”)