Trump and Putin, behind the scenes

[Admin]

President Trump’s outside legal team representing him in the ongoing Russia probe knew about the email chain surrounding a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer more than three weeks ago, according to a new report. Yahoo News reported Thursday that Marc Kasowitz, Trump’s lead lawyer handling the Russia probe, were informed about the emails in June after they were discovered by lawyers representing Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and White House senior adviser. Trump said in an interview Wednesday with Reuters that he only found out recently about his son’s meeting with the Russian lawyer last summer who was presented as having compromising information on campaign rival Hillary Clinton.

Trump's lawyers knew about Trump Jr. emails weeks ago: report | TheHill

[Admin]

Vintage Krugman:

The New Climate Of Treason
The title of this post comes from a once-famous book about the senior British officials who, it turned out, spied for Stalin. I found myself thinking about that book’s title while watching the conservative movement react to news that yes, the Trump campaign was in contact with Russian agents, and was willing, indeed eager, to engage in collusion.

With very few exceptions, this reaction has taken two forms: defining collusion down, or celebrating it. Some are arguing that saying “I love it!” when Russian agents offer damaging information about your opponent doesn’t count as collusion unless it’s sustained (which it might have been, by the way – we just don’t know yet), or unless it determined the election outcome. By that standard, of course, Kim Philby did nothing wrong, since the West ended up winning the Cold War. Others are basically saying that cooperating with a foreign dictator is no big deal if it protects us against real threats, like universal health care.

The New Climate Of Treason - The New York Times

[Admin]

A Soviet military intelligence officer turned lobbyist attended the meeting at Trump Tower last June with Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and a Russian lawyer, NBC News reported Friday. Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-born lobbyist who since at least last year has been working with the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, to overturn a US law sanctioning Russians, confirmed his participation in the meeting to the Associated Press. He said that Trump Jr. asked Veselnitskaya for information on illicit money flowing into the Democratic National Committee but that Veselnitskaya had nothing substantive to provide.

Trump Jr. has said that he agreed to meet with Veselnitskaya last June at Trump Tower to discuss compromising information she said she had on Hillary Clinton but that he was disappointed the meeting instead focused on Russia's adoption policy. Veselnitskaya later told NBC News that she didn't have derogatory information on Clinton and asked for the meeting to talk about the Magnitsky Act.

Donald Trump Jr. meeting featured ex-Russia intelligence officer - Business Insider

Veselnitskaya told The Journal she communicated with Russian Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika and regularly passed along information about a US-born hedge-fund manager named William Browder, who was a critic of Russia and a supporter of US sanctions that riled the Kremlin. "She's been in touch with Chaika daily coordinating the Russian state attack against me," Browder said in an interview with Business Insider on Friday. "They have initiated a massive list of criminal allegations against me including: murder, espionage, fraud, tax evasion, bankruptcy and slander."

Veselnitskaya said she worked to spread information about Browder in retaliation for his lobbying on behalf of the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which was passed to punish those suspected of being involved in the death of Russian tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who uncovered a $230 million tax-fraud scheme in 2008 that implicated high-level Kremlin officials and allies of President Vladimir Putin.

Natalia Veselnitskaya Trump Jr. meeting talked to Russia's top prosecutor - Business Insider

[Admin]

The plot thickens..

When President Donald Trump’s son, son-in-law and campaign chairman met last June with a Russian lawyer they’d been told had “incriminating” information from the Russian government about Hillary Clinton, there were other people in the room. One of the previously unidentified attendees was Anatoli Samochornov, a Russian-born American translator who previously spent years working for the U.S. government.

Samochornov would not confirm that he was in the room, citing nondisclosure agreements. But The New York Times’ Ken Vogel said Friday on MSNBC that Samochornov was at the June 9 meeting in Trump Tower. The interpreter’s mother-in-law also confirmed his attendance at the meeting to The Daily Beast.

Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with the Trump team, had previously told the Times that an interpreter attended the meeting, but refused to name him. Veselnitskaya does not speak English, and Samochornov has worked with her several times over the past year, including around the time of the meeting with Trump Jr.

The Associated Press and NBC News confirmed Friday that Veselnitskaya’s top U.S. lobbyist, Rinat Akhmetshin, also attended the meeting with her. Akhmetshin is a Russian-American with past ties to Russian intelligence.

Samochornov’s presence at the meeting is key because he appears to be the only witness to the event who does not have close ties to either the Trump campaign or the Russian government. He wouldn’t tell HuffPost whether he had been contacted by investigators probing the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia. The office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the House and Senate intelligence committees declined to comment.

Also At Trump Jr.-Russia Meeting: An Ex-U.S. Government Worker With Liberal Views | HuffPost

[Admin]

The meeting lasted "15 to 20 minutes," according to Sekulow. Trump Jr. had said it lasted about half an hour. Either way, at 4:40, roughly 40 minutes after the meeting began, Trump began tweeting about Clinton's emails. "Where are your 33,000 emails that you deleted?" Trump tweeted in response to a quip from Clinton. 

Trump and his surrogates have insisted the president did not learn of the meeting until last week. But his legal team knew about it at least three weeks ago, according to Yahoo, when Jared Kushner's lawyers informed them of the email chain. The chain, which was forwarded to Kushner, prompted him to amend his security clearance form — for the second time — on June 21. 

Trump Jr. has said the meeting was inconsequential and a waste of time. But Sekulow's comment about the Secret Service, and Trump's reported presence at Trump Tower while the meeting was taking place, raise questions about how plausible it is that his son, campaign manager, son-in-law, and Secret Service detail (if they were made aware of the rendezvous) never told him about it, or that he himself did not attend.

That is especially true given Trump's hands-on approach to all aspects of his business empire, biographer Tim O'Brien has noted. According to a former business associate, Jody Kriss, "Donald [Sr.] was always in charge."

“Donald had to agree to every term of every deal and had to sign off on everything," Kriss, who worked with the real-estate company Bayrock before leaving because he was convinced it was a money laundering front, told O'Brien last month. "Nothing happened unless he said it was okay to do it. Even if Donald Jr., shook your hand on a deal, he came back downstairs to renegotiate if his father told him to.”

Trump's lawyer may have let something slip about Don Jr.'s meeting with Russians - Business Insider

[Admin]

LOL

The Trump administration has variously denied every meeting with Russians, dismissed its importance, claimed Trump didn’t know about it, and admitted he may have.

While stolen emails published by WikiLeaks did reveal that a then-CNN contributor Donna Brazile gave Clinton’s campaign a heads-up about some debate questions, it is a novel concept to suggest that this was somehow illegal. Moreover, a senior aide to her chief primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), has confirmed that Brazile routinely helped both campaigns.

The greatest irony is that if Trump believes that breaking primary debate rules is illegal and equal to collusion with foreign governments, he too is guilty. Trump repeatedly broke GOP debate rules, consulting with his campaign manager during commercial breaks.

Trump: My son’s Russian collusion doesn’t matter because Hillary Clinton broke debate rules

[Admin]

No Trump Jr. is anything but transparent..

Trump’s Jr.’s story has shifted a lot
My colleague Dara Lind has a detailed rundown of Trump Jr.’s shifting stories about this meeting, but here’s an express version:

• As of July 7, his operative story — as told to the New York Times back in March — was, “Did I meet with people that were Russian? I’m sure, I’m sure I did. But none that were set up. None that I can think of at the moment. And certainly none that I was representing the campaign in any way, shape or form.”
  
• Then on July 8, when the Veselnitskaya meeting first came to light, he explained it was “primarily” about “a program about the adoption of Russian children,” which “was not a campaign issue at that time.”
  
• Then on July 9, when more information about the meeting was revealed in the press, Trump Jr. conceded that it was in fact a meeting with “an individual who I was told might have information helpful to the campaign,” but he indicated that he hadn't known who she was and he didn’t mention anything about the Russian government.
  
• Then on July 10, when he realized the New York Times was about to publish an email exchange setting up the meeting, he got out ahead of the story and published it himself — including the previously omitted fact that the stated purpose of the meeting was for Veselnitskaya to serve as a conduit for information provided by the Russian government.
  

Having been caught, red-handed, in several different iterations of lying, this would have been a good opportunity for Trump Jr. to fully come clean. I’m not sure how he could excuse the months of lying about there having been no meetings whatsoever. But he could maybe write off the July 8 through 10 equivocations as simply a defensive response to having been under threat, apologize profusely, and offer a full and detailed account.

But he didn't. Instead, he and all of Trumpworld congratulated themselves on their transparency, insisted no meaningful information had changed hands, and began shifting into trying to insulate Trump Sr. from complicity in Trump Jr.’s lies and cover-ups. Then came the news that Rinat Akhmetshin, possibly a Russian spy himself, was also at the meeting. Akhmetshin’s presence is significant in its own right — he’s a US citizen born in Russia, formerly working for Russian intelligence and more recently working as a lobbyist on Russia-related issues — but it’s mostly significant because it leaves Trump Jr.’s credibility in the dust.

I don’t believe Donald Trump Jr., and neither should you - Vox

And there are a host of questions he should answer, see article, especially for the suspicious time line on Trump Sr. actions, like announcing a major speech on Hillary just after the meeting.

[Admin]

Hmm..

Jay Sekulow, one of President Donald Trump’s attorneys, suggested Sunday that the June 2016 meeting between multiple Russians and Trump’s son, son-in-law, and campaign manager was vetted by the United States Secret Service.

Although he claimed that the president did not know about or participate in the meeting — which was attended by Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort — Sekulow suggested on ABC’s This Week that it could not have been really bad or else the agents would have stopped it. “I wondered why the Secret Service, if this was nefarious, why did the Secret Service allow these people in?” Sekulow told ABC’s Jonathan Karl. “The president had Secret Service protection at that point. That raised a question with me.”

In November 2015, then-Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson approvedSecret Service protection for then-candidates Donald Trump and Ben Carson. The agency protects “[m]ajor presidential and vice presidential candidates and their spouses,” as well as the president, vice president, their immediate families, and visiting foreign heads of state and their spouses. As such, Trump and his wife Melania were being protected at the time of the meeting.

But at that point, the Secret Service was not protecting any of the Trump campaign representatives who actually attended. Only in September 2016 — well after the Russian visit — did agents begin to provide protection for Ivanka Trump. Prior to that, Trump’s adult children were only provided with protection when “physically near the candidate,” according to a contemporaneous ABC News report. Separate protection for Eric Trump and Donald Jr. came sometime after that.

Did Donald Trump’s lawyer accidentally make a huge confession about the meeting with the Russian…

So, was the President (then candidate) actually at the meeting? This seems like the only reason for the vetting..

[Admin]

Unbelievable..

White House press secretary Sean Spicer returned to the podium Monday afternoon for an off-camera press briefing at which he reportedly told journalists that “there was nothing as far as we know that would lead anyone to believe” Donald Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with a Kremlin-linked attorney was not about adoption policy.

According to Politico, Spicer refused to discuss the meeting further and referred questions to outside counsel. Glenn Thrush, also of the New York Times, responded in all caps, pointing out why the statement was so absurd:

 Follow
Glenn Thrush 

✔@GlennThrush
Except for the part where DON JR. HIMSELF RELEASED EMAILS ADMITTING HE TOOK THE MEETING BECAUSE HE WAS PROMISED DIRT ON HILLARY CLINTON. https://twitter.com/peterbakernyt/status/887020475544727552 …

Sean Spicer still thinks Trump Jr. met with Russians because of adoption - Vox

[Admin]

Former spies say Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Russian lawyer and a Russian-American lobbyist at Trump Tower last June looks like a textbook intelligence operation aimed at gauging the Trump campaign's interest in colluding with Moscow to undermine Hillary Clinton. When a music publicist representing the Russian-Azerbaijani pop star Emin Agalarov emailed Donald Trump's eldest son asking whether he would meet with a "Russian government attorney" who wanted to provide dirt on Clinton "as part of Russia and its government's support" for his father's campaign, Trump Jr. replied, "I love it especially later in the summer."

The four-page email chain — which Trump Jr. forwarded to his father's campaign manager at the time, Paul Manafort, and to Trump's son-in-law and current senior adviser, Jared Kushner — culminated in a June 9 meeting at Trump Tower with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin..

Was Trump Jr. Russia meeting an intelligence operation? Former spies think so - Business Insider

Now, why would he forward that email chain to Manafort and Kushner, but not his father, who his defenders claim had such a hands on approach and was basically running the campaign singlehandedly?