AT LEAST ALGER HISS HAD THE DECENCY TO HIDE HIS COLLABORATION:

When people say there is no evidence of collusion, they mean, we suppose, that there is no evidence of covert or illegal collaboration with the criminal activity undertaken in the course of this foreign intelligence operation against the United States.

But that is rather a different matter than acquitting Trump and his campaign of collaborating with the Russians. It ignores, after all, the overt and perfectly legal collaboration they plainly engaged in with what they knew to be an ongoing foreign intelligence operation against their country. We don't need an investigation to show that this overt activity took place, for the Trumpists were caught in flagrante delicto throughout the entire campaign; indeed, caught is even the wrong word here. The cooperation was an open and public feature of the campaign.

It included open encouragement of the Russians to hack Democratic targets; denial that they had done so; encouragement of Wikileaks, which was publicly known to be effectively a publishing arm of the Russian operation, in publishing the fruits of the hacks; and publicly trumpeting the contents of stolen emails.

Most notoriously, on July 27, Trump stated during a news conference: "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." He later doubled down on the statement, tweeting:

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 Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

If Russia or any other country or person has Hillary Clinton's 33,000 illegally deleted emails, perhaps they should share them with the FBI!

12:16 PM - 27 Jul 2016

  24,076 24,076 Retweets   62,076 62,076 likes

In other words, after the Russian government had already been publicly associated with the hack, Trump urged it to conduct further hacking. One of the present authors wrote as much at the time, arguing that Trump had just "call[ed] on a foreign intelligence service to engage in operations against the United States."

On at least one occasion, Trump also publicly celebrated a pending Wikileaks release of further hacked information, that is, the release of stolen material by an organization whose connections to Russian intelligence were hardly a secret. Giving a speech in Miami on November 2, he declared: "So today, I guess WikiLeaks, it sounds like, is going to be dropping some more, and if we met tomorrow, I'll tell you about it tomorrow, but one beauty that's been caught was, and this was just recently, newly released, where they say having a dump. We're having a dump of all of those e-mails. . . ."

He also declared multiple times that he "love[d] Wikileaks" or "love[d] reading those Wikileaks"--that is, knowing that a foreign intelligence operation had taken place against his opponent and the Wikileaks was publishing the fruits, he publicly celebrated the publisher. Three days before the election, he riffed at a campaign rally: "You know, as I was getting off the plane, they were just announcing new Wikileaks! And I wanted to stay there but I didn't want to keep you waiting. I didn't want to keep you waiting. Let me run back onto the plane and find out!"

Included below in the Appendix to this article is a rough and incomplete timeline of both Trump's statements obscuring Russia's intervention and his appeals to Wikileaks material--that is, material stolen by the Russians and published by an organization publicly identified as fronting for them--throughout the campaign.

All of which is what Clint Watts was talking about last week when he told the Senate Intelligence Committee that: "part of the reason active measures have worked in this U.S. election is because the commander-in-chief has used Russian active measures, at times, against his opponents."

When Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, sought the top-secret security clearance that would give him access to some of the nation's most closely guarded secrets, he was required to disclose all encounters with foreign government officials over the last seven years.

But Mr. Kushner did not mention dozens of contacts with foreign leaders or officials in recent months. They include a December meeting with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, and one with the head of a Russian state-owned bank, Vnesheconombank, arranged at Mr. Kislyak's behest.

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