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(Lawfare)
If the Trump campaign didn’t collude with the Russians, it wasn’t for lack of trying.
Let’s review the facts.
-First came the Wall Street Journal’s series of reports late last month on the late GOP operative Peter W. Smith’s attempt to obtain emails that he believed were stolen from Clinton's private server by Russian hackers. In Smith’s conversations with people he tried to recruit to the effort, he strongly implied that Michael Flynn—the Trump campaign’s key national security figure—was an ally. In a follow-up story, the Journal reported that Smith had listed Flynn, Stephen Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and Sam Clovis in a recruiting document, although his purpose was not clear and the document did not indicate he requested or received their assistance. The story also named former GCHQ information security specialist Matt Tait as the individual who provided the Journal the document.
-The document, entitled “A Demonstrative Pedagogical Summary to be Developed and Released Prior to November 8, 2016" and dated September 7, 2016, was ostensibly the cover page of a dossier of opposition research that was to be compiled by Smith’s group and which purported to note the involved participants.
-In a separate first-hand account at Lawfare, Tait then offered a detailed account of his communications with Smith, who reportedly reached out to him for help authenticating emails ostensibly stolen from Clinton's private email server and being provided to Smith by people on the "dark web" whom Smith believed to be Russian hackers.
-Then, on Saturday, the New York Times reported that last summer, Donald Trump Jr., Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and the president's son-in-law Jared Kushner met with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with Kremlin ties, at Trump Tower. The meeting took place on on June 9, 2016, the same day Trump tweeted at Clinton, "[W]here are your 33,000 emails that you deleted?" Trump Jr. issued a statement confirming his meeting with Veselnitskaya but explaining that the subject was mainly "the adoption of Russian children.” Trump Jr. also noted that he "asked Jared [Kushner] and Paul [Manafort] to stop by."
-On Sunday, however, the Times reported that Trump Jr. met with Veselnitskaya specifically after he was promised damaging information about then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Trump Jr. then issued a second, significantly more detailed statement. In it, he specified that Kushner and Manafort were told "nothing of the substance” of the meeting before arriving and stated that his father “knew nothing of the meeting or these events." He revealed that the intermediary who asked him to have the meeting was an acquaintance he knew from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, which Donald Trump convened in Moscow. And he admitted both that he was told in advance that the person he was meeting “might have information helpful to the campaign” and that during the meeting Veselnitskaya "stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton." Later on Sunday, the Washington Post reported that the intermediary was Rob Goldstone, the manager of Azerbaijani pop star Emin Agalarov, whose father Aras Agalarov is a billionaire Moscow developer who reportedly previously served as a liaison between Trump and Vladimir Putin. (See also Emin Agalarov's 2013 music video featuring a cameo from Trump, and Trump’s November 2013 tweet declaring, “EMIN was WOW!”)
-Last night, the Times reported what is perhaps the most significant detail to emerge yet from the story: that before arranging the meeting with Veselnitskaya, Goldstone allegedly informed Donald Jr. in an email that the information she would offer was part of a Russian government attempt to help his father's candidacy.
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