The Latest on Trump-Russia: Don Jr. Met with Russians During Campaign; Lied About Reason for Meeting

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Monday, July 10, 2017
On Saturday night, the New York Times dropped a bombshell: During last year's presidential campaign, Don Trump Jr. "arranged a meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan with a Russian lawyer who has connections to the Kremlin." The meeting, which was also attended by presidential advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner and former campaign chair Paul Manafort, was "primarily about an adoption program," according to a statement issued by Don Jr.
The Russian lawyer invited to the Trump Tower meeting, Natalia Veselnitskaya, is best known for mounting a multipronged attack against the Magnitsky Act, an American law that blacklists suspected Russian human rights abusers. The law so enraged Mr. Putin that he retaliated by halting American adoptions of Russian children.

The adoption impasse is a frequently used talking point for opponents of the Magnitsky Act.
The next day, Jo Becker, Matt Apuzzo, and Adam Goldman had a follow-up at the Times disclosing the real reason for Don Jr.'s meeting with Veselnitskaya: Trump's Son Met with Russian Lawyer After Being Promised Damaging Information on Clinton.
Trump's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign, according to three advisers to the White House briefed on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it.

...It is unclear whether the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, actually produced the promised compromising information about Mrs. Clinton. But the people interviewed by The Times about the meeting said the expectation was that she would do so.

...The meeting — at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, two weeks after Donald J. Trump clinched the Republican nomination — points to the central question in federal investigations of the Kremlin's meddling in the presidential election: whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians. The accounts of the meeting represent the first public indication that at least some in the campaign were willing to accept Russian help.
And it was one month later that [video autoplays] Trump invited the Russians to hack us, saying: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press."

Still, Trump claims he was unaware of the meeting. (That's what happens when your sister is Daddy's Favorite.)

The meeting, according to "two people briefed on the meeting," was facilitated by an intermediary named Rob Goldstone, who's "the president of a company called Oui 2 Entertainment who has worked with the Miss Universe pageant" — which Trump owned from 1996 to 2015.


So, now we have a credible report of the president's son organizing a meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer who promised to give him dirt on Hillary Clinton, and attending that meeting with his brother-in-law and Manafort one month before his father openly invited the Russians to hack the U.S. government in search of Hillary Clinton's emails.


And, as if to prove my point, during his morning tweetshitz today, Donald Trump published this absolutely incredible tweet:


Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is just openly laughing about controlling the White House, and neither political party seems willing to do what needs to be done to protect this nation's sovreignty, if there is even anything left to protect.

Everybody seems too busy dithering about whether there is proof of collusion to address the evidence of the collusion right out in the open to focus on what to do now before we're fully a vassal state.

The Democrats are typically being too officious and the Republicans are being their usual collection of opportunistic sadists and unprincipled cowards.

Apparently, we didn't bother electing any patriots. Whooooops.
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