Re: The Timing, perhaps, but I also think this announcement three days before the Prump/Tutin summit in Helsinki was quite intentional. And apparently there were inklings of this post's headline over a year ago: How Alleged Russian Hacker Teamed Up With Florida GOP Operative
This has been hinted at for months. When I heard it again today I wondered if this wasn't timed purposefully to provide plausible deniability for Trump. Make a public statement using a known grandstander on the day you plan to attack. It's just enough space to create doubt. I'm definitely not a fine legal mind so I have no doubt this raised suspicion with Mueller and his team. You have to look for the intent of the people handling Trump and they were by all accounts running a campaign based on the assumption of a loss. This creates a wide net that's going to take down plenty of people who are stupid enough to fight the investigation. Hopefully many top tier people still in government. I have a higher level of faith in some random dude I'd never heard of a year or two ago than I do in the brokenness of American democracy. What I'm really dreading is whatever backlash this causes