Josh Marshall summarizes what we’ve learned.
…the seemingly accidental redaction error in the Manafort legal filing combined with the news published mid-evening by The New York Times is one of the biggest revelations in more than two years of the Trump/Russia scandal. It’s bigger than the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016, though the two cases can’t be fully understood without reference to each other. Just as importantly, these new revelations combined with earlier reports effectively end the debate about whether there was ‘collusion’ between Russia and the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. There was. It wasn’t marginal. It was happening at the very top of the campaign. The campaign manager was secretly funneling campaign data and information to a Russian oligarch closely tied to Russian President Vladimir Putin, someone who had no possible use for such information other than to use it in the Russian efforts to get Donald Trump elected President.Let’s review the key details
Source: The ‘Collusion’ Debate Ended Last Night – Talking Points Memo
There are no innocent explanations for why you would share these data. Internal polling data is the life’s blood of a campaign organization. It’s used primarily to craft messages and target outreach, and it’s always extraordinary closely held within the campaign. Even just knowing when and where an organization is polling is kept as secret as possible, since you can usually extrapolation from that to campaign strategy even without the data itself. So for Gates and Manafort to give this to Team Russia while Team Russia was attacking our electoral system…..
It all happened. That’s the conspiracy, not this effort to expose the truth. It all happened.