During the campaign cycle, payments from the Republican National Committee to this company called the Hamilton Trading Group drew some attention because the RNC said they were payments for an assessment of building security at RNC headquarters in Washington and it looked unusual on a financial disclosure form. That was the RNC s story, as well as that of Hamilton s co-founder, Ben Wickham, and they stuck to it.Until recently. Most of the $41,500 the RNC paid to Hamilton actually went towards intelligence-gathering for the purpose of digging up dirt on Hillary Clinton. Wickham, an ex-CIA officer, insisted at the time that his work was entirely for building security, but now he s saying that he  wasn t totally forthcoming  because the dirt-digging they did was protected under a non-disclosure agreement.The big kicker is that Hamilton has strong connections in Russia. They ve done background checks and provided security services for American companies and officials   work that was done by an ex-KGB agent. According to Wickham, Gennady Vasilenko has  very good contacts in Russia.  However, he also claims never to have had any contact with Donald Trump, Paul Manafort, or any of their people, and that their work has nothing to do with Russia itself.We re pretty sure at this point that Russia hacked the DNC and began releasing batches of documents and emails that were damaging to the DNC for the purpose of helping Trump and harming Hillary. That the RNC worked with a company, which has its own ties to Russia, to build two dossiers on Hillary that supposedly showed she intervened on behalf of energy companies that had donated to the Clinton Foundation in both Israel and Bulgaria just compounds their growing  Russia problem. Trump has people on his team in the White House that have their own ties to Russia. House Intel chair Devin Nunes may have his own ties. Now the RNC itself admits to paying a company with heavy connections to Russia to dig up dirt on Hillary Clinton during the election. This has been out of control for a long time.Featured image by Justin Sullivan via Getty Images