WikiLeaks has long been considered part of the propaganda arm of Russia, by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Oddly enough, the hackers’ haven never seems to have much to say about any other nation, but they’re overly obsessed with wreaking havoc in America.

They’re (by “they’re” I mean Julian Assange) not good guys.

So, yes. When a candidate for the highest office in the U.S. is overly friendly with proven enemies of our nation, we should all be on alert.

Not only have Donald Trump and his clingers praised WikiLeaks, but according to a CNN report, WikiLeaks were prepared to allow Trump and his campaign unfettered access to the files they’d collected from hacked DNC documents and emails.

According to the report, in September 2016, Trump, his son, Donald Trump Jr., and others received an email offering them a decryption key, as well as a website address to gain access to those WikiLeaks documents.

The September 4 email was sent during the final stretch of the 2016 presidential race — two months after the hacked emails of the Democratic National Committee were made public and one month before WikiLeaks began leaking the contents of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s hacked emails.

The email came less than three weeks before WikiLeaks itself messaged Trump Jr. and began an exchange of direct messages on Twitter. Trump Jr. told investigators he had no recollection of the September email.

There’s that faulty memory, again.

Congressional investigators are now tasked with determining the authenticity of the emails, as well as just what kind of access WikiLeaks may have been trying to gain to Trump, his son, and the rest of the campaign.

Trump Jr.’s attorney verified the existence of the email. It came from someone named “Mike Erickson.” It also offered access to hacked emails of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who saw those emails made public by a Russian front group 10 days afterwards.

The use of a website and decryption key as a means to provide information aligns with past WikiLeaks practices. The idea is that WikiLeaks posts a data file on the Internet, but it is encrypted and impossible to open without the key.

In 2010, for instance, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange posted a “poison pill” on the Internet in the form of a 1.4-gigabyte file that contained damaging information, possibly about the US government. The file was encrypted, but Assange said a few trusted associates had the key to unlock it in the event that he was imprisoned or WikiLeaks was destroyed.

Last month, Trump Jr. released messages he exchanged on Twitter with WikiLeaks starting in September 2016, including about an anti-Trump PAC’s password and a request from Trump Jr. and his father to push out links about the WikiLeaks’ Podesta email release.

And we all know Trump loves WikiLeaks.

During his Wednesday hearing, Donald Trump Jr. referred to his exchanges with WikiLeaks as being the same as communicating with CNN or NBC.

And I can’t even begin to express how misguided and ignorant that is.

*EDIT*

File this one under, So This Happened…

As streiff pointed out today, CNN got their wires crossed on this one. Apparently, the dates were wrong, and the gist of the story, that Trump & Company may have got a tip about the hacked emails ahead of the release, was wrong.

The date seems to be the legs to the whole story, so if the legs are taken out, pretty much the whole story falls apart.

Do better, CNN.