TOM BARRACK. Never forget him. He's Trump's most trusted adviser—and I've been saying for months he and his pal Mike Flynn are key to explaining why a washed-up, deep-in-debt Manafort ended up on the campaign and how early Trump joined the conspiracy to use foreign powers to win.
2/ It was *under a week* after Manafort finally wrested control of the Trump campaign and Trump's schedule from Corey Lewandoski that Manafort's pal Tom Barrack started emailing foreign nationals saying he could set up meetings with Trump. Manafort's takeover was also Barrack's.
3/ Barrack and Flynn seem to have engineered not only Manafort's takeover of the Trump campaign's day-to-day operations but also the hiring of the whole national security team. In doing so, it seems they engineered the selling of the campaign to Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
4/ If you understand the Kushner-Barrack-Prince-Flynn-Manafort axis, with under-lieutenants Sessions and Clovis and "off-campaign" liaisons Stone and Don Jr., you basically understand how the Trump campaign became in early '16 essentially a foreign rather than American operation.
5/ From February/March 2016 (Papadopoulos and Page's hire by Clovis, likely engineered by Flynn) onward, the only way to *truly* understand every action taken by the Trump campaign is to accept that it was a subsidiary of Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE using American liaisons.
6/ Foreign agent Flynn, recruited by possible foreign agent Barrack and an informal Trump advisor beginning August 2015, officially joins up in February 2016 and IMMEDIATELY (that WEEK) the bizarre hires of foreign agents begin. Manafort. Gates. Page. Papadopoulos. Maybe Schmitz.
7/ Why does a campaign that hasn't even won the GOP primary start staffing up with men who can act as intermediaries to foreign nations? Why does a GOP primary candidate who hasn't even won yet start reaching out secretly to foreign nationals when *foreign assistance is illegal*?
8/ This can't be overstated: foreign nationals are useless to a US primary campaign—by law. Yet Trump was collecting secret ties and relationships to foreign nationals beginning in early '16—and those relationships changed the GOP platform and led to offers of illegal assistance.
9/ Either Tom Barrack is cooperating, or Mueller plans to break him. I suspect the former, given that Mueller already has Flynn and Flynn would have given up Barrack as part of his deal. I suspect the content of Trump's private calls to Barrack is somehow getting back to Mueller.
10/ People misunderstand "coordination"—when a campaign *systematically reaches out to foreign nationals* at a time when foreign assistance is *illegal*, even if assistance never arrives you've coordinated because the campaign actively sought and encouraged illegal contributions.
