It’s a coinkydink. July 27, 2016:

Donald Trump: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing." https://t.co/f522S7Tn0F

— CNN (@CNN) July 27, 2016

Also July 27, 2016, per today’s indictment:

July 27, 2016, Trump: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing."
Indictment: That evening, Russian operatives targeted Clinton campaign emails "for the first time." pic.twitter.com/fanyaAxwfJ

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) July 13, 2018

Ingraham later “clarified” that tweet to note that the indictment doesn’t say Russia tried to hack Team Hillary for the first time, period, that day in July. They’d been trying to hack her campaign and the DNC for months by that point. Nor does it say that they attempted to hack her infamous “homebrew” server that day, as that was already offline by July 2016. What it implies is interesting enough, though: Did they zero in on a fresh set of email accounts used by Hillary’s office in response to Trump’s calls to, ahem, “find” her missing personal emails?

Could be just a coincidence but Andrew Prokop’s right to note that the indictment specifies the Russians started probing those particular accounts that day “for the first time” and that they did so “after hours,” which reads like an attempt to emphasize that it happened later in the day than the Trump clip above. It implies without clearly asserting that the hackers were reacting to Trump’s presser. Needless to say, even if that’s true, it doesn’t amount to collusion: It makes Trump’s half-joking invitation to the Russians to victimize her smell even worse than it did at the time, but you’re not going down on a conspiracy charge if you say “I wish X would happen” and then someone hears you and independently goes and does X. It does make you wonder what the Russians were thinking, though, if in fact they were inspired by Trump to start searching that domain for her personal emails that day. Was the plan to approach Team Trump with the material if they succeeded in uncovering it?

Or was the idea that, if they did start looking for Hillary’s personal emails after Trump had invited them to do so, leaking that fact later would look very, very bad for Trump?

Attorney Ken White, a former federal prosecutor, weighs Trump’s comments and the apparent Russian reaction and wonders if what he said might amount to aiding and abetting a crime. Probably not…

/4 Also (b) (b) Whoever willfully causes an act to be done which if directly performed by him or another would be an offense against the United States, is punishable as a principal.

— IncitementToResurrectionHat (@Popehat) July 13, 2018

/6 So, I doubt what appears to be Trumpian bluster/hyperbole/shit-talking qualifies for specific intent to cause the crime. /end

— IncitementToResurrectionHat (@Popehat) July 13, 2018

…but if Mueller has evidence that Trump knew about specific hacking efforts, White noted afterward, that might change the game. Of course, if you’re sweet on that theory, you run into an obvious problem: Why the hell would Trump be talking publicly about Russian hacking if he was in on it somehow behind the scenes? If he knew what they were up to and wanted them to “find” Clinton’s emails, that’s a message that would have been conveyed privately.

Here’s John Podesta, the most famous victim of Russian hacking in 2016, celebrating the indictment. I think Michael Dougherty’s right about this morning’s indictment: With the focus now on Guccifer 2.0 and interactions with certain unnamed “U.S. persons” about releasing the hacked documents, Roger Stone is clearly in Mueller’s crosshairs.

JUST IN: John Podesta on new indictments: "Donald Trump likes to describe this as a witch hunt—well, we just found some witches, and they were indicted." https://t.co/FSyoW1grGT pic.twitter.com/KEdtVWRCMw

— Evan McMurry (@evanmcmurry) July 13, 2018