So even the cover story is the candidate meddling in foreign policy. On the face of it, Republican Trump gang was undoubtedly asking for a quid pro quo: lift sanctions after Putin lifts adoption ban. So the cover story is a crime on par with Nixon-Kissinger meddling in Paris Vietnam peace talks October 1968 and Reagan dealing arms to Iran for hostages Oct 1980.
But of course the subtext, as we are knowing more and more, was that Republican President Trump would collude with the Russians to receive support & dirt from their hackers & bots. The payback would be lifting sanctions. The smoke & mirrors would be Putin lifting the adoption ban so that it would seem as if lifting sanctions was only tied to the adoption ban.
excerpts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Accords#Claimed_sabotage_of_negotiations_by_Nixon_campaign
Bryce Harlow, a former White House staff member in the Eisenhower administration, claimed to have "a double agent working in the White House....I kept Nixon informed." Harlow and Henry Kissinger (who was friendly with both campaigns and guaranteed a job in either a Humphrey or Nixon administration in the upcoming election) separately predicted Johnson's "bombing halt". Democratic senator George Smathers informed President Johnson that "the word is out that we are making an effort to throw the election to Humphrey. Nixon has been told of it".[3]
According to presidential historian Robert Dallek, Kissinger's advice "rested not on special knowledge of decision making at the White House but on an astute analyst's insight into what was happening." CIA intelligence analyst William Bundy stated that Kissinger obtained "no useful inside information" from his trip to Paris, and "almost any experienced Hanoi watcher might have come to the same conclusion". While Kissinger may have "hinted that his advice was based on contacts with the Paris delegation," this sort of "self-promotion...is at worst a minor and not uncommon practice, quite different from getting and reporting real secrets."[3]
Nixon asked the prominent Asian-American politician Anna Chennault to be his "channel to Mr. Thieu"; Chennault agreed and periodically reported to John Mitchell that Thieu had no intention of attending a peace conference. On November 2, Chennault informed the South Vietnamese ambassador: "I have just heard from my boss in Albuquerque who says his boss [Nixon] is going to win. And you tell your boss [Thieu] to hold on a while longer."[4] In response, President Johnson ordered the wire-tapping of members of the Nixon campaign.[5][6] Dallek wrote that Nixon's efforts "probably made no difference" because Thieu was unwilling to attend the talks and there was little chance of an agreement being reached before the election; however, his use of information provided by Harlow and Kissinger was morally questionable, and vice president Hubert Humphrey's decision not to make Nixon's actions public was "an uncommon act of political decency."[7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Surprise_conspiracy_theory
The allegations that the Reagan team subverted the U.S. government's attempt to resolve the hostage crisis were generally regarded as an unsupported conspiracy theory until the Iran-Contra affair was exposed in 1986, which showed that the U.S. government had made a secret deal with the Iranian government in 1985 to covertly supply Iran with arms, with the funds being used to support the Nicaraguan Contras. Investigations of the Iran-Contra affair, in which the Central Intelligence Agency played a central role, made the 1980 October Surprise allegations, in which Iran and the CIA also figured, seem less implausible, leading to more serious investigation of the claims.
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