Follow The Money, Putin And Rump Edition

Much of this week's breathless and superficial media coverage of the "disarray' in Dem ranks focuses on the catty and idiotic anti-Sanders e-mails by DNC staff.  Not surprisingly, the fascinating route those e-mails took to get in the public domain is largely being ignored by most in the media (Too complicated! Hard work!). More cyber forensic work needs to proceed, but it's certainly something our intrepid corporate media needs to get busy on. (Ed. -- Also, if the DNC hasn't already asked the FBI to look into the hacking -- likely by Russian intelligence sources -- then they're incompetent beyond belief). UPDATE: The FBI has announced minutes ago that they are investigating the hacking.

Regardless of how that develops, as we noted the other day, over at the excellent Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall is pointing to here-and-now, demonstrable links between Russian autocrat Vladimir "Vlad the Invader" Putin and neo-fascist demagogue Donald "Rump" Trump that involve huge investments and loans from Russian institutions controlled by Putin and individual cronies of Putin's in Trump's business ventures. Since Rump's business ventures have become toxic to American banks, he's had to seek financing abroad, the bulk of which is apparently coming from Putin's Russia. Here's Marshall's summary:

"There is something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of circumstantial evidence for a financial relationship between Trump and Putin or a non-tacit alliance between the two men. Even if you draw no adverse conclusions, Trump's financial empire is heavily leveraged and has a deep reliance on capital infusions from oligarchs and other sources of wealth aligned with Putin. That's simply not something that can be waved off or ignored."

Documentation of that reliance could be the "bombshell" in Rump's tax returns that former Republican Presidential nominee Willard "Mittens" Romney suggested last winter when trying to raise questions about Rump's fitness for the Presidency. That would certainly explain Rump's adamant and, for Presidential elections, unprecedented refusal to release his tax returns.  It's all the more reason to demand them and to follow the money.