TAILGUNNER ANDY:

[T]rump's remarks, echoing Russian propaganda about its aggression, are apt to be of interest to the special counsel. [...]

Just sticking with what we know (as if Mueller has no other information): Cronies of Putin told Trump-campaign officials that the Russian government wanted Trump to win the election. Trump recruited into his campaign the likes of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, who had close ties and multi-million-dollar business dealings with Putin cronies, including leaders of the Kremlin-backed Ukranian political party that was largely responsible for the strife in Ukraine that has led to civil war and Putin's annexation of Crimea. Manafort, who became Trump's campaign chairman, offered briefings on the campaign to Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch so close to Putin that the latter has interceded on Deripaska's behalf to protest U.S. travel restrictions. The Trump campaign also recruited as a foreign-policy adviser Carter Page, an obscure figure best known for being so sympathetic to the Kremlin, and so financially involved in the Russian energy sector, that Russian intelligence attempted to recruit him as an asset in 2013 (apparently unsuccessfully).

Meantime, top Trump-campaign officials elected to take a meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer at which they expected to receive incriminating information on Hillary Clinton that came straight from Russian-government files. The meeting was a bust -- the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, appears to have used it as an opportunity to lobby top Trump associates against the Magnitsky Act, a notorious pet peeve of Putin's. Yet the president's son, Don Jr., apparently at the president's urging, attempted to mislead the New York Times about the genesis of the meeting, coming clean only after learning that the Times had, and was about to publish, Trump Jr.'s emails detailing the expected transmission of campaign dirt about Clinton.

There is no known indication of any Trump-campaign participation in the hacking of Democratic email accounts. Nevertheless, Mueller is known to be investigating Trump associate Roger Stone, who is known to have communicated online with a hacker known as "Guccifer 2.0." An indictment filed by Mueller identifies a persona known as Guccifer 2.0 as a front for Russian military intelligence, responsible for hacking the emails of the Democratic National Committee, which were leaked to the media right before the 2016 Democratic convention.

In August 2016, weeks before WikiLeaks published the emails stolen from the account of Clinton-campaign chairman John Podesta, Stone posted a tweet that could be interpreted as (but did not necessarily indicate) foreknowledge of the Podesta hack. ("Trust me, it will soon the Podesta's time in the barrel. #crookedHillary" [sic].) In October 2016, as WikiLeaks was preparing to publish the Podesta emails, Stone was in touch with Randy Credico, a left-wing radio host who credibly claimed to be in contact with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Stone described Credico as his "back-channel communication with Assange." Stone was also exchanging emails with Steve Bannon, then Trump's campaign manager. Stone tweeted on October 3, "I have total confidence that @wikileaks and my hero Julian Assange will educate the American people soon. #LockHerUp." WikiLeaks began publishing the Podesta emails on October 7.

It has been credibly reported that Mueller is investigating the controversial conservative writer Jerome Corsi over his contacts with Stone -- and has pressured Corsi to plead guilty to misleading the grand jury about them. Mueller is also investigating the efforts of a Republican activist, Peter Smith (who died in 2017), to locate through hackers the 33,000 emails Hillary Clinton purged from her private server system. Smith was not part of the Trump campaign, but he reportedly told people that Trump-campaign officials, including Flynn, were aware of his efforts and encouraged them.

Trump officials have denied these claims. But the allegation can come as no surprise since candidate Trump himself infamously exclaimed (at a July 2016 press 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."

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