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Snakes!

I was not shocked to see the connection between WikiLeaks and the Russian intelligence services. At least that helped further discredit its odious leader, Julian Assange. In my view, Assange is a hypocrite who deserves to be held accountable for his actions. He claims to be a champion of transparency, but for many years, he’s been helpful to Putin, one of the most repressive and least transparent autocrats in the world. It’s not just that WikiLeaks avoids publishing anything Putin won’t like and instead targets Russia’s adversaries—Assange actually hosted a television show on RT, Putin’s propaganda network, and receives adoring coverage there. And if hypocrisy isn’t bad enough, Assange was charged with rape in Sweden. To avoid facing those charges, he jumped bail and fled to the Ecuadorian embassy in London. After years of waiting, Sweden eventually said it would no longer try to extradite him, but promised that if Assange came back to the country, the investigation could be reopened.

Assange, like Putin, has held a grudge against me for a long time. The bad blood goes back to 2010, when WikiLeaks published more than 250,000 stolen State Department cables, including many sensitive observations from our diplomats in the field. As Secretary of State, I was responsible for the safety of our officers around the world, and I knew that releasing those confidential reports put not only them in danger but also their foreign contacts—including human rights activists and dissidents who could face reprisals from their own governments. We had to move fast to evacuate vulnerable people, and, thankfully, we don’t believe anyone was killed or jailed as a result. I thought Assange was reckless and wrong, and said so publicly.

The fact that these two old adversaries from my time as Secretary of State—Assange and Putin—seemed to be working together to damage my campaign was maddening. It was bad enough to have to go up against a billionaire opponent and the entire Republican Party; now I also had to take on these nefarious outside forces. The journalist Rebecca Traister observed once that there was “an Indiana Jones–style, ‘It had to be snakes’ inevitability” about me facing Trump. “Of course Hillary Clinton is going to have to run against a man who seems both to embody and have attracted the support of everything male, white, and angry about the ascension of women and black people in America,” she wrote. I was up for the challenge. And I might add: Of course I had to face not just one America-bashing misogynist but three. Of course I’d have to get by Putin and Assange as well.

By midsummer 2016, the whole world knew that Trump and his team were cheering on the Russian attack on our democracy, and doing everything they could to exploit it. Trump never even tried to hide the fact that he was making common cause with Putin. But what if they were doing more than that? What if they were actually conspiring with Russian intelligence and WikiLeaks? There wasn’t any evidence of that yet, but the coincidences were piling up.

Then, on August 8, Trump’s longtime consigliere Roger Stone, who cut his teeth as one of Richard Nixon’s “dirty tricksters,” bragged to a group of Florida Republicans that he was in communication with Assange and predicted that an “October surprise” was coming. This was a shocking admission, made in public, from Trump’s longest-serving political advisor. Stone made similar statements on August 12, 14, 15, and 18. On August 21, he tweeted, “Trust me, it will soon be Podesta’s time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary”. This was particularly notable because, as I mentioned earlier, we had determined there was a good chance that John’s email might have been hacked, but didn’t know for sure. Stone kept at it over the next few weeks, even calling Assange his “hero.”

I wasn’t the only one who noticed. At the end of August, Harry Reid, one of the congressional “gang of eight” who are briefed on the most sensitive intelligence matters, wrote a letter to FBI Director Comey that cited Stone’s claims and asked for a full and thorough investigation. “The evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign continues to mount,” Reid wrote. He also raised the prospect that there might be an attempt to falsify official election results. This was a reference to public reports that Russian hackers had penetrated voter registration databases in both Arizona and Illinois, prompting the FBI to warn state election officials across the country to upgrade their security. Like Morell’s op-ed, Reid’s letter was an attempt to shake the country out of its complacency and get the press, the administration, and all Americans focused on an urgent threat. It didn’t work.