The second category -- apart from election laws and related finance laws -- would be aiding and abetting computer theft insofar as there were illegal hacks into the DNC computers, and WikiLeaks and/or the Trump campaign knew that that happened, knew the hacks were illegal and knew they were willing to do everything they could to take advantage of it in order to help Trump win the election. That's another fertile ground for illegality.
And the third category would of course be what I think will ultimately turn out to be the easiest to prove: the obstruction issues, relating to some of the behavior that we already know that George Papadopoulos, for one, engaged in when he lied to investigators about the nature of the connections between Trump and Russia.
Moyers: On the money issue, The Atlantic magazine published a very strong piece last week by Bob Bauer, in which he argues that Donald Trump Jr.'s private Twitter correspondence with WikiLeaks provides evidence of criminal violations of federal campaign finance rules which prohibit foreign spending in American elections, as you pointed out. He reminds us that those rules disallow contributions, donations or "anything of value" provided by a foreign national to sway an election. Those rules also bar a campaign from offering substantial assistance to a foreign national engaged in spending on American races.
Here's a direct quote from Bauer's article: "Trump Jr.'s messages not only powerfully support the case that the Trump campaign violated these rules, but they also compound the campaign's vulnerability to aiding and abetting liability under the general criminal laws for assisting a foreign national in violating a spending ban. ... The facts and circumstances here are without precedent in the history of campaign finance enforcement, and it's hard to imagine that any truly neutral analyst informed about the law would conclude otherwise."
So he concludes that Trump and his campaign face a "whopping legal problem."
Harper: I agree with him completely. And here we reach one of what I call "the hot dates" when all these strands coalesce. You have these September-October email exchanges between Don Jr. and WikiLeaks. But now listen to what else you have: On Oct. 12, [Trump's friend and former adviser] Roger Stone tells NBC that he has a backchannel communication with WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks' private message to Don Jr. suggests that Trump publicize the Clinton documents from WikiLeaks. Fifteen minutes later Trump Sr. tweets about those WikiLeaks documents. That's on one day. This is all on Oct. 12. And two days after that, Don Jr. tweets the very WikiLeaks link that WikiLeaks had already suggested that they publicize. That's one point where these strands coalesce. My point is that Bauer's case is even stronger than he may realize when you look at what you and I have called circumstantial evidence of what other things were happening, and how other layers of action were behaving at the same time.
Moyers: As you know, American intelligence has identified WikiLeaks as a conduit for information that Russian operatives stole from Democrats during the 2016 presidential campaign, and now of course it seems there was a connection between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign, as you've just outlined it. What do we know about why the Russian government would choose WikiLeaks to release information hacked from Hillary Clinton's computers?
Harper: I think it was an outlet that would ensure publicity, maximum publicity. It's a notorious organization. And I think if you want bad stuff to get out there and you want everybody to notice it, WikiLeaks would be the way to do it.
Moyers: Donald Trump Jr. reportedly has released all of his correspondence with WikiLeaks. Does this indicate his lawyers don't think it is incriminating?
Harper: I think it is probably more likely the case that his lawyers assume that it's going to come out eventually anyway. So the best way to do it is to sort of dribble these things out, hope for an intervening scandal, like Al Franken groping somebody or Roy Moore upsetting the Alabama election, and then let the mind of the body politic move on to something different. The good news is that Robert Mueller is not going to be distracted by the intervening events, and he'll put all this together.
Moyers: But how significant is it that when Donald Trump Jr. had all of this information from WikiLeaks, it's now being reported that he looked around the campaign to see if he could find someone who would act on WikiLeaks' information, and it doesn't seem that anyone responded? His appeals seem to have fallen on deaf ears.
Harper: What makes you think no one responded? The fact that there's no email trail doesn't necessarily mean that there wasn't a response. We know, for example, that what was happening throughout the campaign were interactions and conversations and discussions in which certainly one of the topics included granting Russia relief from sanctions. I don't conclude that because an email response to Donald Jr. has yet to make its way into the public domain, nothing happened.
Moyers: So when Donald Trump on Oct. 10, tells the crowd at a campaign rally, "I love WikiLeaks," and accuses the press of not picking up on what WikiLeaks was publishing, he knew WikiLeaks had dirt on Clinton, where it came from, and he wanted to get it out.
Harper: You would think so. And I'm most happy, frankly, that Mueller has such an extraordinary team of talented lawyers working with him, because the case from the prosecutor's side is a dream in terms lending itself to a coherent, cogent narrative that strikes me as a really damning case.
Moyers: Is Julian Assange of WikiLeaks in any danger of facing US prosecution?
Harper: Not as long as he stays in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Let's assume he will stay out of the country for a while. I suppose Trump could pardon him.
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