The controversy over Donald Trump's ties to Russia, explained

In July, Donald Trump did something extraordinary even for him: He called on a foreign power to launch an espionage operation against his chief political opponent, hacking into Hillary Clinton’s email server to find 30,000 emails she allegedly deleted.

"Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," Trump said. "I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press."

When Trump said it, it didn’t sound like a joke — especially in light of recent events. Just before Trump's comment, WikiLeaks released about 19,000 emails that were stolen from the DNC servers by hackers who were almost certainly linked to the Russian state. These emails included talk of a (never-realized) plot to attack Bernie Sanders on his religion, a revelation that exacerbated divisions inside the Democratic Party and thus seemingly helped Trump’s political chances.

All of this raises one big question: What the hell is going on with Trump and Russia?

The answer appears to be twofold. First, the Kremlin appears to be interfering in the US election in a way likely to help Trump become president. Whether or not that’s the intent of the meddling, that is the result.

Second, Trump is deeply, weirdly pro-Russian.

Trump’s proposed foreign policy would, intentionally or no, aid Vladimir Putin in ways the Russian dictator could only dream about before Trump. Trump has repeatedly expressed wild admiration for Putin personally; his campaign staff and businesses have extensive ties to Russian interests. (Just yesterday, the New York Times reported the existence of a handwritten ledger documenting $12.7 million in payments to Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, from Ukraine's pro-Russian deposed president, Viktor Yanukovych).

These facts have led to wilder theories about the Kremlin plotting to elect Trump, or even that Trump might be doing Russia’s bidding. This speculation is just that: speculation. It’s less important than the hard facts about Trump and Russia.

And the hard facts are these: Trump's policy instincts are objectively pro-Kremlin and the sources of information that shape his policy ideas (his advisers and business interests) serve to reinforce rather than challenge these instincts. If the Kremlin is helping Trump win the election, it would be a perfectly rational thing for them to do.

What follows is a guide to all the big issues surrounding Trump and Russia: Putin’s role in the campaign, Trump’s policies on Russia, and Trump’s personal connections to the Russian state.

Warning: It gets pretty weird, and pretty deep, fast.

Russia appears to be helping Trump win

To understand Trump’s comments about hacking Clinton, and why they are so controversial, you need to understand a little bit about the DNC hack that came before it.

The DNC hack was detected in April 2016 and made public on June 14. By that point, hackers had access to DNC servers for about a year — and had stolen huge amounts of information, including thousands of emails, chatlogs, and documents.

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity contractor employed by the DNC, initially traced the hack to two hacking groups — called Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear — widely believed to be sponsored by the Russian government. "We’ve had lots of experience with both of these actors attempting to target our customers in the past and know them well," CrowdStrike CTO Dmitri Alperovitch wrote in a blog post about the hack.

But on June 15, a hacker named Guccifer 2.0 claimed responsibility for the hack. His name is a reference to Marcel Lazăr Lehel, — a now-jailed Romanian hacker who famously claimed to have hacked Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Lehel’s nome-deplume was, you guessed it, Guccifer.

Guccifer 2.0 claimed to be a Romanian lone wolf, with no ties to Russian intelligence or any other organization. But shortly after Guccifer 2.0, evidence emerged that it was a false identity — that the hack was, as originally reported, Russian intelligence.

For one thing, Guccifer 2.0 doesn’t appear to speak Romanian. Vice’s Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai interviewed him, mostly in English but with a few Romanian questions peppered in. Guccifer tried to dodge chatting in his allegedly native language, and, per Franceschi-Bicchierai, "the few short sentences he sent in Romanian were filled with mistakes."

For another, two other cybersecurity firms investigated the hack, and found direct evidence supporting CrowdStrike’s conclusions. Perhaps most compellingly, they found that the malware infecting the DNC used an IP address that had previously been used in a hack targeting the German parliament. The German hack was — you guessed it — linked to Russian intelligence. It’s very unlikely that some other hacking group would use such similar code.

"The forensic evidence linking the DNC breach to known Russian operations is very strong," Thomas Rid, a professor at King’s College who studies cybersecurity, wrote in Vice. "The forensic evidence that links network breaches to known groups is solid: used and reused tools, methods, infrastructure, even unique encryption keys."

Then, between the Republican and Democratic national conventions, WikiLeaks released a trove of 19,000 documents from a DNC hack. Suspicion immediately fell on Russian intelligence: After all, they were the only group widely believed to have penetrated DNC servers and extracted documents.

Close examination of the documents’ metadata found tell-tale traces of Russian work.

A security researcher, known on Twitter as @PwnAllTheThings, found that a user named Felix Dzerzhinsky modified the documents before release. The name Dzerzhinsky references the founder of the Soviet secret police; the kind of hacker who would go by that nome de guerre is probably at least sympathetic to Putin. @PwnAllTheThings also found error messages written in Russian, further suggesting a Russian user had control of the documents before WikiLeaks received them