If Trump’s team was colluding with Russia, why did it keep asking Wikileaks for things?

Stone’s relationship with WikiLeaks is the strangest, given his tweets about being privy to information from the group. The most notable was his Aug. 21, 2016, tweet, “Trust me, it will soon the Podesta’s time in the barrel.” This was several days before Credico first interviewed Assange, which Credico told the Journal was the beginning of their relationship. Stone tweeted about having been in contact with Assange several weeks prior.

Clearly there was not a robust enough relationship between Stone and WikiLeaks that Stone could ask Assange questions directly in mid-September — if there was any relationship at all, which WikiLeaks has denied publicly and in leaked contemporaneous conversations.

Trump Jr. is a more interesting case. We know that he had already been contacted on multiple occasions by people hoping to connect him indirectly to the Russian government, including the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 and at an event related to the National Rifle Association convention earlier that year. His private questions to WikiLeaks, though, suggest that if he was part of any long-term working relationship with Russian actors — an idea for which there isn’t obvious evidence — it didn’t overlap with Russia’s leak of stolen material to WikiLeaks.