Season 6 of “The Wire” May Star Trump Campaign Aide

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The hot gossip about the indictments issued today is this: Was George Papadopoulos wearing a wire? Papadopoulos is a small fish who was arrested in July, but his arrest was kept secret until today. Why? In a court filing, investigators said it was because they wanted to preserve Papadopoulos’s value as a “proactive cooperator”—a term of art that means the defendant will engage in some kind of undercover activity. Allahpundit lays out the basic theory:

Imagine Papadopoulos phoning a former top Team Trump official in early August to say, “They’ve arrested me! I don’t know what to do! I think I should tell them everything and make a deal!” He might have been told no, no, no, stay calm, deny X, Y, and Z, we’ll make sure Mueller never finds our emails from the campaign. And meanwhile, unbeknownst to the target, Mueller’s recording the entire conversation on Papadopoulos’s end.

Maybe! It’s best not to get carried away with this kind of stuff right now, but we all want to keep up to date on the latest lurid speculation, don’t we?¹

¹You don’t? Then why are you reading a blog on your lunch hour?

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We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

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