When the New York Times initially reported the story of Donald Trump having a second unplanned meeting on July 7th with Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit, they also reported that the next day, on the return trip on Air Force One, a statement was drafted for Donald Trump Jr. so he could respond to questions about an undisclosed meeting he had organized between himself, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and a Russian lawyer.
Here’s how that early reporting looked:
The evening after his two meetings with Mr. Putin — the first lasting 135 minutes and the second an hour — Mr. Trump returned to Washington. On the Air Force One flight back, his top advisers helped draft a statement about a meeting his son Donald Trump Jr. attended last year with a Kremlin-connected lawyer who promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton.
The statement said that the meeting was primarily about the Russian ban on Americans adopting Russian orphans. Sometime later, on July 19th, the president explained in an interview with the New York Times what he had talked about with Putin during his unscheduled meeting at the G20 dinner.
“We talked about Russian adoption. Yeah. I always found that interesting. Because, you know, he ended that years ago. And I actually talked about Russian adoption with him, which is interesting because it was a part of the conversation that Don [Jr., Mr. Trump’s son] had in that meeting.”
In this time period, Trump and his lawyers and surrogates denied that Donald Trump had been aware that the story about Donald Jr. was coming and only learned about it when everyone else did after the story broke in the New York Times. They also denied (necessarily) that Trump had any role in crafting the statement on Air Force One.
There turned out to be quite a few problems with this story.
First, on July 13th, Michael Isikoff reported for Yahoo News that “President Trump’s legal team was informed more than three weeks ago about the email chain arranging a June 2016 meeting between his son Donald Jr. and a Kremlin-connected lawyer.”
More than three weeks before July 13th, places White House awareness of the story back around June 20th or so. So, first we’re asked to believe that Trump’s lawyers did not make him aware that his son and son-in-law were in some legal jeopardy and that the collusion story was about to get a big boost. That’s not credible.
Second, this means that Trump knew the story was going to break before he talked to Putin, which means that it’s no small coincidence that they talked about adoptions and then adoptions became the cover story.
Third, it’s now clear that Trump not only participated in the drafting of the statement for his son, but he actually overruled the legal advice he had available on Air Force One and dictated the misleading adoption attempt at a coverup.
Fourth, the same reporting shows that the Trump Jr. statement was a topic of discussion among Trump’s advisors “on the sidelines” of the G20 summit, meaning that they were debating it before Trump had a second unscheduled hour long chat with Putin at the last night’s dinner.
On the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Germany last month, President Trump’s advisers discussed how to respond to a new revelation that Trump’s oldest son had met with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign — a disclosure the advisers knew carried political and potentially legal peril.
The strategy, the advisers agreed, should be for Donald Trump Jr. to release a statement to get ahead of the story. They wanted to be truthful, so their account couldn’t be repudiated later if the full details emerged.
But within hours, at the president’s direction, the plan changed.
Flying home from Germany on July 8 aboard Air Force One, Trump personally dictated a statement in which Trump Jr. said that he and the Russian lawyer had “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children” when they met in June 2016, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deliberations. The statement, issued to the New York Times as it prepared an article, emphasized that the subject of the meeting was “not a campaign issue at the time.”
As these facts have been disclosed and made public, the administration’s story has changed. They now admit that Trump played a part in the drafting of the statement but they insist that he didn’t “dictate” it. Supposedly, this is all okay because Trump was just showing a fatherly concern for his son.
If I tried to make a list of all the lies the administration has told in this matter, I’m not sure I could capture them all.
Instead, I’ll just give a little timeline. Sometime around June 20th, the president learned that the media was aware of a meeting his son had organized at Trump Tower with Kremlin-affiliated Russians. At that point, he presumably asked for all relevant information about the meeting and tasked people with organizing a response. While he was in Germany at the G20 meeting, he and his advisers learned that the story was about to break. They strategized about what they could use as a defense. The president spontaneously joined Putin at the July 7th dinner with no American interpreter present and discussed the Russian adoption cover story with him. On July 8th, on Air Force One, he drafted or “dictated” the Russian adoption cover story over the protests of his legal team. After the story broke, Trump insisted that he had no prior knowledge of the meeting. He and his lawyers and surrogates insisted he had no role in drafting the statement.
What Trump didn’t count on was that the New York Times would obtain actual copies of emails detailing that the meeting was pitched to Donald Trump Jr. by assets of the Kremlin as an opportunity for the Kremlin to help Trump get elected. This blew up the adoption cover story that he and Putin had agreed to at the G20 dinner.
The only part of this that isn’t already proven is my surmise that Putin was a partner in the cover story. But I can’t see it any other way.
At this point, the only thing that could surprise me is to find that Putin Skypes into all of Trump’s meetings.
Scratch that. Even that wouldn’t shock me anymore.
The major weight for Putin colluding in the cover story can only come from the observation that Trump is not capable himself of constructing that plausible a lie.
Or the desire to think that Putin was not trying to rid himself of a pest at the G-20.
As Trump has been lying throughout much of his life — sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t — he’s quite capable of concocting any lies around this matter he deems necessary without any help from Putin (who btw isn’t stupid enough to collude with Trump in a cover-up over a meeting, that offered the Trump campaign nada, with a non-government Russian lawyer and an American (Russian until he emigrated) DC lobbyist.
For me this goes into my round file along with the birther nonsense and stupid claims that Hillary was culpable for the attack on the Benghazi mission and death of Amb Stevens (and others). (And iirc Clinton’s story changed over time but it still didn’t change the fact that she wasn’t involved, nor should she have been, in what led up to the attack that day. Plus she was present and engaged in the matter from the time the first reports of the attack reached DC and criticisms of what she did then are only nitpicking and/or Monday morning quarterbacking.)
Are you still on the fence on Seth Rich or nah?
lol
How is that relevant to my comment, this FP entry, or thread?
Since you asked and I don’t lie, it remains in my pending file. In part because I intensely dislike many of those pushing the narrative and avoid whatever they spew as much as possible since they can’t even seem to add something as simple as 2+2. They and others want the leaker to have been Rich and I don’t. However, that doesn’t alter the fact that there was a leaker or a hacker. That question along with the identity of person or persons unknown is still open.
It’s relevant because you’re as delusional as our president, and yet somehow you’re suggesting against all evidence we throw the entire Russia investigation in the trash, placing it alongside Benghazi (btw the guy pushing Benghazi also behind the Seth Rich bullshit) and birtherism.
There’s a reason I said a long time ago that if Putin doesn’t send her checks, she’s really wasting her talent.
You ain’t kidding.
If money did it for me — I’ve had a few opportunities — I’d be rich today which I’m not.
What I’ve never done is prepare an analysis based on front-loading it with an undisclosed probability or major assumption and then claim that the analysis was solid except for that front-loading.
Reminds me of the analyst that asked me for a consult on an account of his that tanked and the loss estimate by the lawyers was $15 million. He couldn’t fathom that it would be more than $3-5 million. He was devastated as I walked him through the estimate – $15 million +/- $1 million. But the more relevant question to me was how he’d gotten so far out on the account. (On its own it was a POS that I’d declined a few years earlier — don’t know that he knew or remembered that and didn’t seem to be an appropriate point to bring up.) The answer was an assumption that the Koch Brothers wouldn’t let the account fail.
I’m not delusional (evidence that I was perfectly able to process the Benghazi information) and I’ve never suggested that we throw the entire Russia investigation in the trash, If for no other reason, people like you will never be satisfied until every rock has been overturned and no evidence for Russian interference in the US election and collusion with Trump can be found. Maybe not even then if you follow the path of the diehard birthers.
What I’ve put in the round file is the Don Jr. etal. meeting. Because he’s an idiot and gained nothing from it. If he had, it would have been used by the Trump campaign. A second reason is that his opponent (to be correct, member(s) of her team were actively seeking dirt on Trump from Russian officials and fmr officials. It may all be sleazy, but it’s apparently fair game.
I’ve already stipulated that I pay no mind to the loathsome creatures that pushed the Benghazi nonsense and are now pushing the Rich story. So, why do you accuse me of being aligned with them? That seems like what a delusional person would do. (Or a first rate propagandist which I know you’re not.)
You desperately want to believe what DWS (who lies a lot) and Clapper (who lies a lot) and Brennan (who lies a lot but in this instance hasn’t gone as far as DWS and Clapper have. Tough to be objective when in the grip of a belief.
You may have facts on your side in your disputes with your mother, but you don’t have them in this matter. Yet, you’re acting as if you do and that anyone that doesn’t share your belief, that’s still sifting through whatever (very limited so far) information that is released, is somehow a crazed idiot.
Because you told fladem in a comment here maybe a few weeks ago that you were “on the fence” with respect to the Seth Rich story:
“This seems to be a plausible story even if I’m not going to run with it yet. But I appreciate the other people who are running with it to discover the truth.”
I don’t run with “plausible” absent some factual (and by factual I mean concrete and not open to dispute) evidence. A proper analysis also demands an assessment of how plausible and as that goes up or down, so too does the level of evidence required.
The universe of potential leakers isn’t small — even if we don’t have a list of their identities. And it’s still plausible that it was a hack — again the universe of potential hacks isn’t small. Those that have zeroed in on and now believe either Rich as a leaker or Russia as the hacker are making the same cognitive error. Accepting meager evidence for a plausible that isn’t robust in either scenario.
People end up with a lot of egg on their faces when they jump off that plausible fence with a guess no better than flipping a coin to either “sure thing” or “impossible.”
I dunno marie3, if we were to discuss the provenance of the 9/11 attacks would it be relevant that you’d spent a lot of time arguing about the relative temperatures of jet fuel and steel beams?
Nope. The professional engineers have that one right. The ‘truthers’ are out-to-lunch, but the only way they will ever be convinced is with a full demonstration of the exact same event. Nobody with a spare couple billion dollars is willing to fund that experiment.
Since you raised this question, let me state my nuanced opinion so that you can have more fun making ad hominem attacks.
No one knows yet why Seth Rich was killed; the DC police are still investigating it. That likely is a joint investigation by multiple police agencies.
It is highly unlikely, but not impossible, that Seth Rich leaked materials from the DNC. Those going down this trail don’t completely have motive (presumed on their part), means (never outlined), or opportunity. Nor do they have evidence (which should exist on computer logs) that he made any unauthorized actions.
A theft of data from within the DNC network is more likely than an external attack. There were more people than Seth Rich working at the DNC, some with much higher computer privileges than Rich. If I were looking, it would be for a outside contractor for computer services who was brought on just for the campaign and not necessarily screened politically. That is more likely than someone with a beef against the DNC. That also will be a difficult situation to investigate unless the person made some mistakes. And that line of investigation does not remove suspicion from either the Trump campaign, the GOP, the Russian government, any of the billionaires wanting Clinton’s defeat, or any other well-heeled actor willing to hire a data thief. The problem all along has been too many suspects.
And the rush to judgment without evidence has been that it was a remote hack and done by Russian government internal security cybermilitary employees who hired and Eastern European hacker or operated under the identity of an Eastern European hacker. The NSA likely is doing as much a retrospective investigation as the Trump administration will allow on this; Mueller’s investigation will likely subpoena something from NSA and either make it public of keep it classified. This is a reasonable course of events to pursue. And it might, although being less probable, well be the case. No one has presented the hard evidence yet of this or any other course of events.
I am not on the fence about Seth Rich. No one has come forward with evidence of a motive. Those closest to him with potential knowledge of his opinions say that the allegation is far-fetched. His opportunities wouls be more limited that other actors and he would have to be pretty savvy in computer security and email systems to pull it off. Moreover there would be a record of electronic transfer, and physical transfer would have required some coordination of logistics with some intermediary. I think that repeating GOP propaganda on this one is not justified just by the fact that (1) he worked at DNC, and (2) he was mysteriously killed.
Mostly agree, but
haven’t seen any computer experts making such a bold claim.
We’re talking about a possible one-time snatch and one or more transfers to Wikileaks. How long did it take the CIA and FBI to zero in on the on-going espionage of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen? In both cases the authorities did know that there was a mole in the agencies. The internal information of both of them, far more extensive than anything existing for a DNC employee, didn’t put them on the suspect until late in the investigations. Regardless of how many times or how frequently we’re surprised or shocked to learn that X did Y, we have a propensity to believe in our powers to assess what an individual may do covertly. OTOH, if not for his untimely murder, there would be no public speculation about Rich.
Instead of counting the lies…it’s time to list the incidents that result in questioning what did the donald know and when did he know it.
This seems to imply he didn’t know all the relevant info about the meeting already so let me add this to the timeline:
Nice addition to the timeline.
Let me add:
“What a tangled web we weave….”
Although you’d think by now he’d have enough experience and to spare, to do a half-decent job of it.
Definitely has lots of experience.
This also makes Don Jr’s decision to release the email chain to the media an awkward family moment. He knew he didn’t write the reply to the story, with or without his lawyers consultation. And, he probably knew that his dad wrote it. So in a Trumpian way Don Jr played his father like Trump plays his own surrogates on a regular basis. This time, now that the facts are rolling out, he discredited his father.
Putin has to be shaking his head that he went to all this work to get Trump in, to protect him and every day Trump doubles down on dumb.
Alas, poor Putin — he wanted a crippled Clinton and got a chaotic clown instead.
He wanted a crippled USA, and he’s getting it.
True dat. On the other hand, I doubt he’d want such a dangerously erratic ignoramus loose-cannoning about in world politics; much easier to deal with a hamstrung Hillary, whose moves and countermoves he could predict with relative certainty. Putin wants power and wealth, not accidental Armageddon.
Although there were undoubtedly other motives as well, Putin’s biggest motive was trying to get the sanctions lifted, which has failed. That is, I suspect, a major loss for him.
OK, so what was actually discussed at the June 2016 meeting?
Trump colluded with the Russian government for it to aid him (in specified or unspecified ways) in getting elected, and is now quite obviously (and in a Mayberry Machiavelli manner) working to cover it up. But who is going to be the John Dean figure here? Or is no human beans-spiller needed any longer because internet?
The active dissembling, lies and cover-up with Putin continue right through to the present!! Un-freaking-believable! His chutzpah, recklessness and outright treason are unparalleled. What a traitor! What a gangster! What a sociopath!
This shameless piece of human garbage needs to be removed from office as soon as possible. I didn’t think it was possible for me to loathe and despise him more than I did before reading this post of yours.
I was wrong.
“What a sociopath!”
What a narcissist! Unfortunately, it’s difficult to do all the things at the link when the narcissist is the President.
The latest Quinnipiac poll finds our god-emperor’s approval rating dipping ever lower, down to 33 percent now — and the biggest dip is coming from Republicans.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/02/politics/trump-approval-new-low-quinnipiac-poll/index.html
We’re not in impeachment is a go territory yet, but you can bet Congress is taking note of this.
27% is the go number.
Sub 45% from Republicans is the magic number. That means less than 50% approval from the base, outside the margin of error on a sustained basis.
That would put Trump in the 23-25% approval range. Nixon territory.
Until the mobility scooter set realizes that Trump is actually going to crush their scooters with the evil Republican monster truck, he’s not going anywhere. Once you’ve thrown your lot in with a racist, p***y grabber, what’s a little treason among friends?
Respectfully, where are you getting this? You say it like it’s a hard fact. I’m not arguing with you — I’m totally on board with the concept, and I hope it’s true — I’m just not understanding where it comes from.
While I hope that my fellow ponders Marduk and LosGatosCA are correct regarding the depths that will trigger a response.
I’ll respectfully remind everyone that a law that enforces background checks for all gun purchase polls at 87% for and 12% against! Oh did I mention that is just for Republicans?
Overall its 92% to 7%.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cbsnyt-poll-gop-voters-have-deep-concerns-about-government/
So why haven’t we seen it?
Meanwhile, in the House Judiciary Committee, absolutely nothing is being done, nor will anything be done:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-02/trump-s-russia-ties-get-no-scrutiny-as-house-pane
l-eyes-clinton
Sometimes, the simplest and most obvious explanation really is the actual truth. Trump and his key campaign people actively colluded with Putin’s people to interfere with the U.S. presidential campaign in 2016 to seriously damage Clinton because Putin knew that he had serious sway over Trump. That “sway” was largely because of the massive amount of illegal Russian money laundering that the Trump organization actively participated in for years. Virtually all of the information that’s leaked out from a variety of sources as well as the FBI, US attny for southern NY (Perrara) and the NY State attny general’s investigations have pointed to this explanation. My guess is that the challenge has been trying to unwrap all the various shell corporations involved as well as other ruses used by the Russians.