Quite a morning on AMJoy as her national security team dug into the bombshell Wall St. Journal story that Trump supporter Peter Smith attempted to buy Clinton emails from Russian hackers -- claiming he was working for the Trump campaign.
If you went to bed early last night, you probably don't know about Matt Tait's subsequent story at Lawfare.com, because Peter Smith attempted to recruit him for this project. I recommend you read it.
Jamali called it a Russian "dangle" operation, where you "evoke imagery of a bright lit lure in a dark ocean and to see what fishies come swimming up."
"You put out there we have these 30,000 missing emails. see who comes out here -- and listen, any Republican operative who wants to get Trump into the White House is going to come looking -- and what do they get? Peter Smith," he said.
"Now, perhaps once he saw this, he brings it back to this, whether it's Kellyanne Conway or Michael Flynn, any other namedroppers that were in the subsequent report, gets to the president, and maybe that president then comes out on TV and says 'Russia, if you're listening, release these emails.' "
"The thing about that, Joy, that's so unbelievably damaging and so frightening, is it shows you both a) how good the Russians are at manipulating people, and b) it shows you how susceptible the man in the White House is to that manipulation."
Reid said the key to this is "the conspiratorial mind-set of both Donald Trump and Michael Flynn. These are people who already had a mindset that Hillary Clinton was just an uncaught criminal, and that whatever the Russians got from the DNC somewhere in there was the criminal intent of Hillary Clinton hiding in it, and that if you could just get her 33,000 specifically emails, then you would catch her.
"That would be the smoking gun, so if the Russians got the DNC, if they got Podesta, surely they must have Hillary's too."
Which lead to Donald Trump asking the Russians to release hacked emails if they had them, and Mike Flynn chanting "Lock her up" at the RNC.
And so on. Listen to it all, it's fascinating.
