A series of seemingly unrelated reports and analyses out this week point in a single direction: The case that Russian meddling played a key role in the 2016 election’s outcome is becoming increasingly evident, and the Russian government found the Trump campaign to be a willing and eager partner in its goals.

Facebook: How do you say “Oops” in Russian?

• On Wednesday, Facebook disclosed that the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm known for spreading pro-Kremlin propaganda, spent about $150,000 on political ads “designed to amplify hot-button social and political issues, such as LGBT rights, race, immigration, and gun rights” during the Republican presidential primaries.
• According to a 2015 report in The New York Times Magazine, the Internet Research Agency has launched several misinformation campaigns in recent years, including spreading derogatory information about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s critics and launching sophisticated hoaxes in the U.S. about chemical leaks, Ebola outbreaks, and murders by police.
• Facebook’s targeting algorithms mean that only the people who the Internet Research Agency wanted to see the ads know what they said, and Facebook has said they “won’t be releasing any ads” — butaccording to Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), the ads directed users to like pages that then flooded their newsfeeds with additional political messages.
• Ultimately, Facebook’s revelation generates more questions than answers:
• Who ordered the ad buys?
• How did Russian’s have such a sophisticated level of understanding about U.S. politics without help?
• Why did they run during the primaries and not the general election?
• Is there any relationship between the Internet Research Agency and the Trump campaign’s digital operations team at Cambridge Analytica, which bragged about similar tactics?
• What was the role of Jared Kushner, who led the Trump campaign’s digital efforts?
• And what might this reveal about the future of Russian meddling in American election?

Donald Trump, Jr., continues to dig himself deeper

• Donald Trump, Jr., spoke with the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday to try once again to provide a satisfactory explanation for his meeting with a Russian lawyer offering dirt on Hillary Clinton on June 9, 2016, but wound up just further complicating his story.
• This week’s justification: He just wanted to learn about Hillary Clinton’s “fitness, character, or qualifications” as a presidential candidate.
• This is just the latest version of Donald Jr.’s constantly shifting story:
• In March, he said that he had no meetings “that were set up … and certainly none that I was representing the campaign in any way, shape, or form;” asked whether he discussed government policy relating to Russia, he said, “a hundred percent no.”
• In July, when The New York Times first reported the June 9, 2016 meeting, he said “an acquaintance” asked him to attend the meeting, but didn’t say who it was with, and that it was a ”short introductory meeting” about Russian adoptions, which “was not a campaign issue at the time.”
• The next day, when The New York Times reported that internal emails showed Donald Jr. knew the meeting would be about Russia’s dirt on Hillary Clinton, he again said he had only taken the meeting at the request of an acquaintance, and only knew that the person he was meeting “might have information helpful to the campaign.”
• Now, he’s acknowledging that he went to the meetings “just to hear them out” about their dirt on Hillary, and that he intended to consult with the campaign’s legal team if it had mattered.
• Takeaway: Donald Jr. has given us every reason not to believe what he says. As contradictions mount on everything from how many people were thereto whether Donald Jr. intended to inform the campaign’s legal team, there’s less and less reason to believe the meeting was just an innocent, one-time mistake.
• In case anybody’s forgotten: “Below is a statute to keep in mind in regards to Donald Trump Jr.’s testimony today,” wrote Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) in an email shortly afterwards. The law: 18 U.S.C. 1001, which outlines the possible punishments for lying to Congress.

It’s time to stop calling the Steele Dossier “unverified”

• This week, John Sipher, a former member of the CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service, took another look at Christopher Steele’s explosive intelligence report on connections between the Trump campaign and Russia.
• Since the Steele Dossier was completed in June 2016, subsequent reports have demonstrated that its central allegation — that the Russian government was engaged in an active cyber campaign to steal and weaponize information on Hillary Clinton in the interest of ensuring the election of Donald Trump — has “turned out to be stunningly accurate.”
• As documented in our report last month, “Russiagate: The Depth of Collusion,” “it is now known that Trump campaign officials,” including Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and Michael Flynn, “had extensive contacts with Kremlin-linked figures during the campaign” — just as Steele wrote in June 2016, well before those meetings became public.
• With more information seemingly coming out every week that confirms the findings of the dossier, from news of the Trump Organization’s interest in pursuing a project in Moscow as late as January 2016 to new details about Donald Trump, Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner’s meeting with a Russian lawyer in June 2016, it’s time that we treat the dossier with the seriousness that it deserves.