Russians, Russians everywhere...

We worked on two presidential campaigns at high levels and there weren’t any Russians around. I don’t think there were Russians around the Obama campaign or the Kerry campaign either. This campaign had Russians all over the place! - Republican strategist Steve Schmidt  8/4/2017

In a Tuesday night court filing, special counsel Robert Mueller’s office revealed that it has linked a Trump campaign official who is cooperating with the special counsel’s investigation to a person who “has ties to a Russian intelligence service and had such ties in 2016.”

According to Mueller’s office, Rick Gates — a longtime associate of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort — was “directly communicating” with a “Person A” who Gates identified to associates as “a former Russian Intelligence Officer with the GRU.” Those contacts occurred “in September and October 2016” and are “pertinent to the investigation.”

A GRU agent is believed to be responsible for hacking Democratic National Committee emails that were published by WikiLeaks. According to a recent Daily Beast report, Guccifer 2.0, the “lone hacker” who took credit for supply WikiLeaks with the emails, “was in fact an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU)… an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft.” In its declassified report about Russian interference in the 2016 election, the Director of National Intelligence assessed “with high confidence” that the GRU “used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks.” Longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone exchanged Twitter direct messages with Guccifer 2.0 during the 2016 campaign.

During the same months Gates with allegedly in touch with the former GRU officer, Trump was exploiting the stolen emails on the campaign trail. The future president mentioned WikiLeaks 164 times during the month of October 2016 alone — but then preposterously claimed after the election that WikiLeaks had “absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.”That

Though it is a virtual given that Gates will sell out his business partner and Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, less understood is the direct threat Gates could pose to President Donald Trump.

That’s the conclusion of several lawyers involved in the Russia case and more than 15 current and former Trump aides and associates interviewed by POLITICO to determine how much danger Gates’ guilty plea could pose to the president and his inner circle, and how alarmed they might be by his testimony.

While Gates now wears a GPS monitor around his ankle, in 2016 he wore a Secret Service lapel pin that gave him easy access to Trump on the campaign trail and at Trump Tower.

“He saw everything,” said a Republican consultant who worked with Gates during the campaign. The consultant called Gates one of the “top five” insiders whom Mueller could have tapped as a cooperative government witness. One defense attorney in the case said Gates’ plea has triggered palpable alarm in Trump world.

Manafort may have struck a larger public profile, but Gates spent more time in Trump’s orbit. Manafort left the Trump campaign under a cloud of scandal in mid-August 2016. Gates, his right-hand man, stayed on through the election before assisting the Trump inauguration and Trump’s early presidency.

Worst of all for the White House, Gates lacks hard-wired loyalty. He is not family, like Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., or his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Nor is he among true Trump believers like Corey Lewandowski and Brad Parscale.
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Trump aides and associates understand that Mueller is sure to ask Gates not just about Manafort but also about his interactions with Trump, his family members and his 2016 campaign team.

“They’ve been very concerned about it,” said the defense attorney. “It's something they're worried about.”