The reported Manafort-Assange meeting is a disaster for Trump

Does Mueller finally have his smoking gun?

President Trump, Julian Assange, and Paul Manafort.
(Image credit: Illustrated | CARL COURT/AFP/Getty Images, MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images, Mark Wilson/Getty Images, alexxx1981/iStock)

A bombshell report from The Guardian this week says that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort met repeatedly with Julian Assange, founder of Russian espionage conduit WikiLeaks, prior to joining the campaign. Just months later, WikiLeaks began releasing tranches of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta, revelations that added to the drumbeat of negative coverage of Clinton, and led the media to focus relentlessly on emails of varying kinds.

If true, this story is obviously terrible news for a reeling Trump administration, and for President Trump himself. If corroborated by sources and other news organizations, the Assange-Manafort meetings might finally prove even to island cave dead-enders that the Trump campaign colluded with Russian intelligence to affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

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David Faris

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. He is a frequent contributor to Informed Comment, and his work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Indy Week.