Former CIA deputy director Mike Morrell, now a senior security adviser to CBS, said in a Saturday interview what many were already suspecting: that the WikiLeaks document dump was an inside job.

While assuring the American public that no, the CIA is not out to spy on you (I report, you decide), he questioned how leaking could have possibly happened:

WikiLeaks may have embarrassed the CIA, but its leader Julian Assange is such a conscientious guy that he’s going to help show tech firms how they can protect themselves from hacking.

What a swell gent!

Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse doesn’t think so.

In a Thursday statement, Sasse, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that Assange should be in an “orange jumpsuit:”

“Julian Assange should spend the rest of his life wearing an orange jumpsuit. He’s an enemy of the American people and an ally to Vladimir Putin. Mr. Assange has dedicated his life’s work to endangering innocent lives, abetting despots, and stoking a crisis of confidence in the West.”

Lo and behold, on Saturday night, Sen. Sasse reported that every one of his devices were hacked. Payback, perhaps?

Sasse’s accusations may not have been off the mark at all, according to Dr. Andrew Foxall, director of the Russia Centre at the Henry Jackson Society, a British think tank. Foxall says that the WikiLeaks dump of “Vault 7” information has Vladimir Putin’s fingerprints all over it:

“Tuesday’s data release comes as the CIA investigates Donald Trump’s connection to Putin, the Kremlin and Russian hacking during the election campaign. It’s all about Russia showing that the CIA is just as bad. . . When Julian Assange launched Wikileaks in 2006 he was talking about transparency in Eurasia where corruption is rife. But actually it is the US which has been targeted.”

“He claims that Wikileaks has secret Russian intelligence but hasn’t disclosed anything remotely sensitive about Russia. He has taken a consistently pro-Russia stance.”

Foxall says that this is modus operandi for Putin’s Russia, as it uses independent pro-Russian groups to carry out cyber attacks in other nations:

“The Russian state denied having any involvement with the cyber attack on Estonia in 2007, which was blamed on a non-Government youth movement called Nashi. Afterwards, whistleblowers from the group revealed they had been taking instructions from Moscow.”

“It is deliberate policy to blur the lines so that Putin can maintain plausible deniability.”

Alina Palyakova of the Washington, DC, based Atlantic Council agrees.

“My view is that Wikileaks is a tool of the Kremlin. Revelations have repeatedly embarrassed the US and fed Moscow’s geopolitical ambition.”

“The smoking gun is the fact that Russia also hacked the Republican National Committee at the same time that it infiltrated the Democratic National Committee. Yet not one word about the RNC was released.”

“Russia didn’t even try to cover up its tracks. It suits Putin for Russians to know that he is capable of being such a big player on the world stage. Tampering with elections is massive. It helps with his domestic agenda.”

Furthermore, the bloom is now off the Trump rose as far as Putin is concerned, she claims:

“The initial elation that existed during the presidential campaign and immediately after Donald Trump was elected has dissipated.”

“Putin has become very cautious of President Trump. Moscow holds mixed views over Trump’s Russia policy, and the US choice of new ambassador to Moscow has been vilified there.”

“What Moscow is doing is undermining western values and principles, and it’s part of what the Russian machine has been doing.”

“There are many Americans who are inherently suspicious of US institutions, and are against surveillance of the population. Showing the extent of the CIA’s activities feeds into that.”

The U.S. is not the only nation to fall prey to cyber mayhem set into motion by Putin. This weekend British cyber experts warned that their MI6 — the Secret Intelligence Service — is vulnerable to hacks as well.

Aiding and abetting Vladimir Putin is none other than Julian Assange. Americans who were staunch supporters of Donald Trump may have cheered on Assange and his merry band of hackers as they released dirt on the Democrats during the election. But know this: Julian Assange is not America’s friend, and his dump of CIA data was very likely done at the behest of his crony Putin.