VLAD WANTED A PRESIDENT WHO WOULDN'T CARE AND DONALD WANTED HIS HELP:

The indictment discusses three distinct stages of the Internet Research Agency's operation: a planning stage in 2014; an operational stage that began in 2015 and became increasingly direct and aggressive throughout the 2016 campaign; and a curious third stage involving money laundering and bank fraud that allegedly began in mid-June 2016.

Efforts began by May 2014, when the indictment says the Internet Research Agency had decided to "interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election." Initially this involved several employees traveling to the United States--ostensibly on vacation but in fact covertly gathering intelligence. Those defendants allegedly gathered information and generated reports for the agency, which reimbursed their travel expenses. By June 2014, the indictment says, the organization was taking active steps to obscure its finances and control.

The indictment doesn't shed light on why the Internet Research Agency might have chosen to meddle in the 2016 election in 2014--long before either Clinton or Trump announced their intent to run. But notably, the dates in the indictment coincide with the Ukrainian Maidan revolution of early 2014. Amid unrest against Viktor Yanukovych, the Russian-aligned politician who was president of Ukraine at the time, Russian officials accused the United States of covertly supporting Ukrainian protesters and seeking to undermine the Kremlin's influence in the region. So a reasonable person might wonder, reading the indictment, whether the beginning of the operation was a retaliation for perceived U.S. meddling in Ukraine.

The operational stage of the influence campaign began around 2015 with a series of fake social media accounts, each designed to look like a U.S. citizen or political group, according to the indictment. The Internet Research Agency allegedly began purchasing advertisements to promote its fraudulent political groups on social media, spending thousands of dollars a month. Over time, the accounts attracted hundreds of thousands of followers.

But in April 2016, this operation became more aggressive, according to the indictment. On April 6, 2016, shortly after Trump clinched the Republican nomination, the group began spending money to promote content explicitly supporting Trump's candidacy and opposing Clinton's. 

In imagining what the next turn in this investigation might reveal, it is important to pay close attention to the indictment's account of Russian intelligence-gathering in the United States. Like any organization spending substantial sums on a political objective, they worked hard to master the American electoral terrain and figure out what worked and what didn't. The Russian operatives were learning about "purple states" from American sources. This was a sophisticated enterprise. It in this context that the Russian meeting with the campaign staff in Trump Tower, and later Donald Jr.'s communications with WikiLeaks, assumes greater significance. It was much to the advantage of the Russians' "Project Lakhta" to have explicit and implicit blessing from the candidate. The Project management would also have benefited from receiving from the candidate and his campaign any signals useful in perfecting their program. Some of these signals have come to light, such as Donald Jr.'s recommendation to WilkiLeaks for a late summer release of the stolen emails.

The record is not yet clear on all that the Trump campaign may have communicated about what it hoped to gain from Moscow's intervention. Steve Bannon, interviewed for hours by Mueller, has publicly discounted the chance that the president would not have known about the June 2016 visit from Kremlin emissaries to Trump Tower. It has been reported that the president directed the misrepresentation the facts of the meeting, but it is not yet clear what level of knowledge he had in advance of the meeting or, if afterwards, when. But, beginning with the Papadapolous encounter with Russians telling him of thousands of stolen Clinton emails, through the Trump Tower meeting and the Donald Jr. contacts with WikiLeaks, the Russians unquestionably appreciated that the Mr. Trump was glad to have their help.

The indictment situates these contacts within the wider and mostly clandestine intelligence gathering operation that the Russians conducted to achieve the most effective possible impact on the presidential campaign. The Russians were more transparent in their direct encounters with the national Trump campaign. And the campaign was not "unwitting." Those on its staff who were engaged in direct discussions with Kremlin representatives were not low-level grassroots organizers, but included the then campaign manager, Paul Manafort, a veteran of five presidential campaigns, and the president's own son-in law. The Russians were explicit about their aims when they needed to be, and the Trump team responded favorably. 

• On Thursday evening, CNN reported that Rick Gates was likely nearing his own plea deal with Mueller's investigators. Gates was the deputy to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and both men were indicted last year by Mueller. If Gates flips, he will have to either testify against Manafort--tightening the noose around the neck of Trump's heavily Russia-connected former deputy--or provide new and damning information against the campaign.

• The indictment says that the Russians sought to infiltrate the Trump campaign: "Some Defendants, posing as U.S. persons and without revealing their Russian association, communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities."

• The indictment mentioned that there are unnamed co-conspirators "known and unknown to the Grand Jury." Pinedo might be one of these figures, but that leaves an open question as to who the others are.

• The Russians were not initially sophisticated in their knowledge of American politics, to the point that they sought out American political actors to learn the basics:

In order to collect additional intelligence, Defendants and their co-conspirators posed as U.S. persons and contacted U.S. political and social activists. For example, starting in or around June 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators, posing online as U.S. persons, communicated with a real U.S. person affiliated with a Texas-based grassroots organization. During the exchange, Defendants and their co-conspirators learned from the real U.S. person that they should focus their activities on "purple states like Colorado, Virginia & Florida." After that exchange, Defendants and their co-conspirators commonly referred to targeting "purple states" in directing their efforts.

• The Russians appeared to start to develop a deeper sophistication around U.S. politics in the spring and summer of 2016. This coincided with the same brief period that Manafort was in charge of the Trump campaign. The Russian efforts included purchasing political ads for Trump and against Clinton on social media starting in April, staging pro-Trump rallies and false flag "pro-Hillary" events starting in June, and doing the sort of low stakes political dirty tricks that have been a mainstay of the Republican Party for decades.

For his part, former CIA Director John Brennan speculated on Friday that it would emerge that U.S. persons had actively conspired with the Russians. "While some may have been unwitting, I do think that some individuals maybe were knowledgeable about what they were doing and basically strayed from what they should have been doing," he told MSNBC.

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