January 27, 2017

For days, threads of stories have been surfacing about the arrest of a key Russian spy on charges of treason, and subsequent arrests of at least one associate.

Sergei Mikhailov was arrested in December for treason, just as news reports were rolling out about confirmed interference in our elections. There has been speculation and a report in The Moscow Times claiming that Mikhailov was a US asset.

According to the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, the FSB believes Sergei Mikhailov tipped off U.S. officials to information about Vladimir Fomenko and his server rental company “King Servers,” which the American cybersecurity company ThreatConnect identified last September as “an information nexus” that was used by hackers suspected of working for Russian state security in cyberattacks.

With this information in mind, watch Rachel Maddow pull all of the threads of the story together into a pretty reasonable explanation of where we're likely to go next.

Trump's first official state phone call will take place this weekend -- with Vladimir Putin. Top officials in the Department of State are gone, ExxonMobil executive Rex Tillerson stands to turn a diplomatic situation into a profit center for his old employer, and sanctions on Russia may soon be a thing of the past as well.

This is a video worth watching. As Maddow points out, it's much more important to pay attention to what they're doing, rather than what they're saying. And what they're doing leads to some pretty obvious conclusions.

Watch and tell me what you think in the comments.

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