It has now become evident that the Russians have been meddling in the internal affairs of the United States beyond the 2016 presidential election.

While the mass media have been focused on President Donald Trump, they missed the really big news about the plan in California to secede from the Union and become a free standing country.

The Yes California organization and the California Freedom Coalition had gathered half of the 585,000 signatures required to put the issue on the ballot in March of 2019.

But then a newsboy in Sacramento stopped to pilfer garbage and found a trove of documents discarded by the Yes California crowd. He sold them to CNN and a panel of six commentators let the bear out of the bag.

Exposure of the plot caused the six financial backers to cancel their checks and head for some island in the Pacific. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is looking for them.

The leader of the secessionist movement, Louis Marinelli, suddenly left California and announced he was seeking permanent residency in Russia. He is married to a Russian woman, who Hillary Clinton alleges was an undercovers agent for Vladimir Putin.

Before leaving for Moscow, Marinelli reported in an email that the Yes California movement picked up speed after Trump was elected. This confession raised even more questions about Trump’s association with the Russians.

By putting all of the pieces together, we can see that a Russian plot to separate California from the United States was in the works.

The Russians have had a grudge against the United States since they were caught taking more than their share of seals on the Pribilof Islands. After that confrontation, the Russians became more aggressive in Alaska.

The Russians had been on the scene since 1784 when Grigory Shelekhov established the Three Saints Bay Colony on Kodiak Island.

Soon the Russians set their sights on California, establishing Fort Ross north of San Francisco for which they paid the natives “three blankets, three pairs of breeches, two axes, three hoes and some beads.”

This messing around on our western shore encouraged James Monroe to issue the Monroe Doctrine in which he said we didn’t want any foreigners in our hemisphere. That is still our doctrine to this day.

In 1841, John Sutter came along and bought Fort Ross from the Russians for $30,000, a sum Sutter forgot to pay. That also irritated the Russians.

We thought our conflicts with the Russians were resolved when Secretary of State William Seward bought the whole territory for $7.2 million in 1867. At two cents an acre, Seward thought the place was a steal but the Russians knew it was sweet revenge because, according to the economics of the day, it was overpriced by $2 million.

All of the $7.2 million did not end up in the Russian treasury because Baron Eduard de Stoeckl, the Russian negotiator, had used money to bribe reluctant Congressmen to vote for the deal. And he kept $165,000 for himself.

With this 150-year track record of Russian intrigue, we should not be surprised that the Russians, through Marinelli, joined in the conspiracy to make California an independent nation.

Without California’s 55 votes in the Electoral College, the Democrats would never again elect a President of the United States and the Russians wouldn’t have to listen to those liberals clamoring over human rights.

If the conspiracy had been successful, a source close to Republican House Speaker Ryan said they would have abandoned the Mexican wall and used the money to add Trump to the Mount Rushmore Memorial right next to George Washington as a reward for anything he had done in the plot.

Lloyd Omdahl is a former lieutenant governor of North Dakota and former political science professor at the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks.