Last week in one sentence: The servers of Russia's Alfa Bank, the Trump Organization, and Spectrum Health (DeVos family) were likely intentionally communicating after all; Mueller is investigating the Trump campaign's connections with an Israeli intelligence firm, Psy-Group, which provided social media influence and opposition-research campaigns to defeat Republican opponents and Hillary Clinton; Mueller warned that Russian intelligence services still have active "interference operations" into U.S. elections; Mueller is also reportedly allowing Trump's legal team to submit written answers to questions regarding collusion with Russia during the 2016 election; Richard Pinedo, a California man charged with identity fraud for providing fake bank accounts to Russians, has been sentenced to 6 months in prison; GOP operative Peter Smith, who was searching for Hillary Clinton's "lost" emails until his death last year, had a relationship with Michael Flynn as early as 2015; Trump spoke with Jeff Sessions' own chief of staff about replacing Sessions as attorney general; Trump's lawyers argued that exploiting stolen information, like hacked emails, is protected by free speech; bipartisan senators introduced legislation to block "any persons from foreign adversaries" from owning or having an interest in vendors that administer U.S. elections; Julian Assange has had his internet partially restored by the Ecuadorian embassy in London in which he has sought refuge.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/what-we-learned/2018/10/week-of-oct-7-13/