WASHINGTON If Donald Trump had trafficked in stolen television sets, he could have gone to jail. But he trafficked in emails stolen by a foreign adversary and went to the Oval Office instead.

Now, with the White House trying to downplay links between the presidents campaign and Russian officials, there still remains the biggest unanswered question about the election: Why did Trump enthusiastically praise WikiLeaks on the stump at a time he had access to classified analyses stating that the group was essentially an arm of Russian intelligence?

There was general intelligence community consensus by August 2016 indeed long before that WikiLeaks was functioning as a cut-out for Russian intelligence, said John Schindler, a former analyst with the National Security Agency and onetime counterintelligence officer.

Among Russia experts, that was a pretty obvious conclusion, said Tom Nichols, a Russia scholar at the U.S. Naval War College, who called WikiLeaks a wholly owned subsidiary of the Russian spy agencies. You didnt need the intelligence community to tell you this. This was common sense.

Even before Trump took office in January, questions arose about the numerous links between his campaign and Russian officials. Prosecutors working for special counsel Robert Mueller and congressional committees are reportedly investigating whether campaign officials sought out cooperation with Russia or accepted offers of cooperation. Among the areas under scrutiny: whether the campaign secretly helped Russian trolls target specific voters with propaganda attacking the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, in misleading Facebook ads and fake news stories.

Yet out in the open and indisputable the entire time was Trumps daily praise of WikiLeaks in the final weeks of the campaign, starting right after the Oct. 7 release of the Access Hollywood tape that seemed capable of sinking his candidacy. That tape contained his boast that he could grab women by the genitals because of his celebrity. WikiLeaks began releasing a new batch of damaging-to-Democrats emails within an hour after the tape story broke, and Trump began talking up those emails in his campaign speeches days later.

WikiLeaks! I love WikiLeaks, Trump proclaimed at a Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, rally on Oct. 10, 2016.

You see so much from these WikiLeaks, he told a Panama City, Florida, audience the next day.

This WikiLeaks stuff is unbelievable, he said the following day at an Ocala, Florida, rally. Youve got to read it!