The depths to which the Hillary Clinton campaign is stooping have not yet sunk in with much of the media, still focused on the intrigue over Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Sanders campaign and supporters in Philadelphia.  But in a panic as the rigged nature of her campaign for the Democratic nomination has been outed just as she was formally to receive it, Team Hillary has gone thermonuclear on Donald Trump, on the theory that a traitor is worse than a crook.

This is an extraordinary sort of charge to imply.  Charley Lanyon of New York Magazine quipped, “The Democratic Party has gone full 24, with party officials openly accusing Russian security forces of hacking their computers to help Donald Trump.”

David Sanger of the New York Times, in an article claiming that forensic evidence supported the idea that Russians were behind the Wikileaks hack, looked to history for precedents:

Even at the height of the Cold War, it was hard to find a presidential campaign willing to charge that its rival was essentially secretly doing the bidding of a key American adversary. But the accusation is emerging as a theme of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign

It “emerged” with a remarkable debut.  Kevin Drum of Mother Jones was one of the first to appreciate the magnitude of the turn of events:

… one of the weirdest stories of any recent presidential campaign: Hillary Clinton's campaign has essentially accused Donald Trump of being a pawn of the Russians. Not in hints; not from an unaffiliated Super PAC; not in a deniable statement from an arms-length surrogate; and not in vague "doesn't put America first" terms. Friday's release of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee, says Clinton's campaign manager, "was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump." And Trump intervened to change the Republican platform last week in a way that "some experts would regard as pro-Russian."

Believe it or not, though, that's not the weirdest part of this story. The weirdest part is (a) Clinton's campaign might be right, and (b) this is not really getting an awful lot of attention from the media.

Let that sink in: the Clinton campaign has explicitly accused the Russians of being on Team Trump and suggested that Trump might be on Team Russia. And although the media is covering it, it's not the top story anywhere. Seriously. WTF does it take these days to lead the news?

Summarized by The Daily Wire, here is the gist of Mook’s charges:

“Experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other expert are now saying that the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump. I don’t think it’s coincidental that these emails were released on the eve of our convention….”

Mook implied that Trump’s approach towards Russia is shaped by connections between the Republican presidential nominee and the Kremlin. A more “pro-Russian” Republican policy platform, said Mook, was a “disturbing” product of what he implied were surreptitious relations between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Here is Mook making the charge on CNN Sunday:

Sanger at the New York Times summarizes the “evidence” that the Russians are behind the hack.

… researchers have concluded that the national committee was breached by two Russian intelligence agencies, which were the same attackers behind previous Russian cyberoperations at the White House, the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff last year. And metadata from the released emails suggests that the documents passed through Russian computers. Though a hacker claimed responsibility for giving the emails to WikiLeaks, the same agencies are the prime suspects. Whether the thefts were ordered by Mr. Putin, or just carried out by apparatchiks who thought they might please him, is anyone’s guess.

Not exactly conclusive.  But hey, a lot of people out there are hackng away.  Probably a lot more than we realize.

This is an extraordinarily dangerous path for the campaign to be following.  If we are to stipulate that foreign intelligence agencies regularly hack political leaders and organizations, then it is conceded that Hillary Clinton’s top secret emails are in Russian and probably Chinese and many other nations’ intelligence agencies.  And so is any blackmail material her deleted emails may contain.

Charging treason didn’t work out so well for Senator Joseph McCarthy.  Something for unlikable and corrupt Hillary, trusted by a smallish minority of the electorate, to ponder.