Rachel Maddow was all over the arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on Thursday, doing a deep dive into the connections between the hacker and contacts Don Trump Jr. was getting from the organization.
The MSNBC host focused specifically on emails that appear to give Don Jr advice on what was to come and how the family should handle the 2016 election if Trump had lost.
"Between on or about October 7th and November 7th, 'organization one,' WikiLeaks, released approximately 33 trenches of documents that had been stolen from the chairman of the Clinton campaign," Maddow explained. "In total over 50,000 stolen documents were released. So Wikileaks is the entity, according to prosecutors that with Russian military intelligence used to get the best stuff that would hurt Clinton the most, soliciting specific stuff about Hillary that would hurt Hillary the most, specifically both in terms of the timing and the content of what they wanted."
"During the time that Wikileaks was liasioning with the Russians, Wikileaks was also in direct contact with the president's eldest son, Don Junior, advising him on how to better circulate the documents that the GRU had stolen for maximum impact -- what link exactly his father should mention and that he should tweet out to make sure that the Russian documents got the widest distribution," she continued.
"Don Junior appears to have been psyched about that particular outreach and posted exactly what they told him to post, posted that link exactly as they told him to post it,"Maddow explained. "Wikileaks also gave the Trump campaign, they gave Don Jr login information for a website criticizing Trump's friendliness toward Putin. Wikileaks gave Don Jr. a heads up that that website was about to launch. on that one Don Jr. appears to have been forwarded that information to lots of other people on the campaign. on Election Day, Wikileaks sent this note to Don Jr. quote, 'Hi, Don. if your father loses, we think it is much more interesting, we think it is much more interesting if he does not concede and spends time challenging the media and other types of vote rigging that occurred as he has implied that he might do. election day. If your father, quote, loses, we think it's much more interesting if he doesn't concede."
You can watch the video here:
