Is Putin already meddling in this campaign? In his chilly way, he has signaled his rooting interest. He praised Trump as “very talented.” His mouthpieces are more effusive. Vladimir Yakunin, the former chairman of Russian Railways, has said of Trump, “He is addressing some internal failings of the American people.” The Kremlin doesn’t seem much bothered to disguise its help. Soon after the discovery of Russian intelligence hacking into Clinton servers, documents suddenly materialized on the web: a PDF of the DNC’s opposition research file and a trove of spreadsheets, including a list of donors to the Clinton Foundation.

Foreign intelligence agencies often go fishing for information on American political campaigns. Chinese hackers tapped Mitt Romney’s servers in search of useful nuggets. But the Russians have made an art of publicizing the material they have filched to injure their adversaries. The locus classicus of this method was a recording of a blunt call between State Department official Toria Nuland and the American ambassador to Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt. The Russians allegedly planted the recording on YouTube and then tweeted a link to it—and from there it became international news. Though they never claimed credit for the leak, few doubted the White House’s contention that Russia was the source.

We can only speculate about the documents the Russians have in their possession and how they might use them. The material they have released thus far is relatively innocuous, but it may just be a hint of leaks to come—as they experiment with unfurling their material and gauging the reactions to leaks. The Clinton Foundation is, after all, a pretty juicy target to have hit—a place with an ethically borderline approach to fundraising and already a primary object of Trump campaign fusillades. One of the sites that has posted purloined material is called Guccifer 2.0, which strenuously protests that it is the work of a lone hacker. The site features a warning that it has released only a small smattering of documents from the “many thousands I extracted.” He is not the only one sitting on a pile of damaging material. Julian Assange, who hosted a show on Russia Today, warned, “We have emails relating to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication.”