Monday, July 17, 2017 9:19:29 PM
Trump meeting with Putin sparks controversy
AM Joy
7/8/17
Donald Trump appeared to accept Putin’s explanation regarding interference in our election over reports from U.S. intelligence agencies during their G-20 meeting. [With Malcolm Nance.] Duration: 16:18
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-news/watch/trump-meeting-with-putin-sparks-controversy-987631683708 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAtKjlzVxiw [with comments]
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Trump and Chinese president discuss North Korea
AM Joy
7/8/17
Donald Trump met with China's president as the G-20 summit in Germany wrapped up. At the top of the agenda: North Korea and their intercontinental ballistic missile test. [With Malcolm Nance.] Duration: 8:35
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-news/watch/trump-and-chinese-president-discuss-north-korea-987640387929
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GOP senators return home to backlash against healthcare bill
AM Joy
7/8/17
During the holiday weekend, many Republican senators faced opposition from constituents, the majority of whom reportedly strongly oppose the Senate healthcare bill. Duration: 9:27
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-news/watch/gop-senators-return-home-to-backlash-against-healthcare-bill-987649091990 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIufnvbfMFk [with comments]
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Trump’s second overseas trip may isolate U.S.
AM Joy
7/8/17
In his speech in Poland, many felt the president suggested that the future of Western civilization might be under threat due to immigration and other issues important to many countries at the summit. [With Malcolm Nance.] Duration: 15:35
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-news/watch/trump-s-second-overseas-trip-may-isolate-u-s-987662915581 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtPkq-QGekQ [with comments]
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Federal budget crisis looms closer
AM Joy
7/8/17
Former labor secretary nominee Andrew Puzder joins AM Joy to discuss the debt ceiling crisis that could lead to a government shutdown, if Congress does not intervene in just a few weeks. Duration: 7:02
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-news/watch/federal-budget-crisis-looms-closer-987670595708
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States reject White House demand for voter information
AM Joy
7/8/17
In an unprecedented show of bipartisan effort, 48 states have refused to give private voter data to Donald Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Duration: 11:46
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-news/watch/states-reject-white-house-demand-for-voter-information-987677251842 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL_8RYrKBiY [with comments]
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Xi, Trump Meet on Ties, Hot-spot Issues on G20 Sidelines
Published on Jul 8, 2017 by CCTV+ [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmv5DbNpxH8X2eQxJBqEjKQ , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmv5DbNpxH8X2eQxJBqEjKQ/videos ]
Chinese President Xi Jinping and his U.S. counterpart, Donald Trump, met in Hamburg, Germany Saturday to discuss bilateral ties and global hot-spot issues on the sidelines of a Group of 20 (G20) summit.
http://www.cctvplus.com/news/20170709/8055175.shtml
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPcQXN8FHiM [with comments]
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China's Xi urges joint efforts to keep China-U.S. ties on track: Xinhua
U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) shake hands prior to a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany, July 8, 2017.
July 8, 2017
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-g20-germany-usa-china-ties-idUSKBN19T0VG
Quiet success for China at G20 as Xi avoids drama and spotlight
July 10, 2017
BEIJING (Reuters) - From U.S. anger over inaction on North Korea to a festering border dispute with India and the ailing Chinese Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, last week's G20 summit was strewn with minefields for China's President Xi Jinping.
By chance or by strategy, Xi and his officials picked their way through unscathed.
Beijing is ultra-sensitive about Xi's image and ensuring he gets the respect it sees as his due as leader of an emerging superpower, especially when traveling to Western countries where it cannot so tightly control the public narrative.
Diplomatic sources in Beijing, speaking ahead of Xi's trip to the G20 gathering in the German city of Hamburg, said Chinese officials had in private expressed nervousness that he could be asked awkward questions about North Korea, or the cancer-struck Liu, jailed for 11 years in 2009 for "inciting subversion of state power".
In the end it was U.S. President Donald Trump's meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, amid accusations Russia interfered in the U.S. election, and Trump's refusal to return to the Paris climate agreement that dominated the limelight.
Xi, by contrast, avoided controversy in his bilateral meetings and reaffirmed China's commitment to the Paris deal and to an open global economy, in what the official China Daily called the "burnishing of (his) reputation".
"Nobody talked about the South China Sea. No one talked about trade. Everyone was happy with Xi. I think he played this well," said Ulrich Speck, senior fellow at the Elcano Royal Institute in Brussels.
"All eyes were on Trump and Putin. But the fact that there was no U.S.-China clash was at least as important. Xi stayed out of the alpha-male fight. China presented itself as a partner to Europe."
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Xi "made it clear that the G20 should adhere to taking the path of open development and mutual benefit leading to all-win results, support a multilateral trade mechanism, and promote international trade and investment".
"China was in a good place at G20, with reasonable policies," said Jin Canrong of the School of International Studies at the Renmin University of China, who has advised the government on diplomatic matters.
"So President Xi was comfortable and positive there."
Don't Mention Taiwan
Potentially the biggest test was Xi's meeting with Trump, who in the run-up to Hamburg had voiced frustration over China's inability to rein in its troublesome erstwhile ally, North Korea.
In the event, Trump returned to the conciliatory tone struck at their first meeting in April, telling the Chinese leader it was "an honor to have you as a friend" and he appreciated actions Xi had already taken to try to dissuade North Korea from pursuing nuclear weapons.
Influential Chinese state-run tabloid the Global Times said in an editorial on Monday that the Xi-Trump meeting had defied "the naysayers in the West".
"Beijing and Washington saw friction on issues including Taiwan and the South China Sea ahead of the meeting, and there was speculation from Western public opinion that the China-U.S. 'honeymoon' had come to an end. But the Xi-Trump meeting repudiates such speculation," the paper said.
Speaking to reporters later on Air Force One, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the Trump-Xi meeting lasted more than an hour-and-a-half, and would have gone on longer had they not had to leave for other engagements.
Ruan Zongze, a former Chinese diplomat now with the China Institute of International Studies, a think-tank affiliated with the Foreign Ministry, said Xi was much more upbeat than when he spoke to Trump a few days ahead of G20 and mentioned certain unnamed "negative factors" in their relationship.
"Even on trade Trump underscored that he wants cooperation," Ruan said.
[...]
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-g20-germany-trump-xi-idUSKBN19V1LF
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U.S. Prepares to Act Alone Against North Korea
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un celebrated the test-fire of an intercontinental ballistic missile on July at an undisclosed location.
Officials consider unilateral moves to tighten sanctions to halt nuclear program
July 10, 2017 Updated July 10, 2017
WASHINGTON—The Trump administration is moving toward unilaterally tightening sanctions on North Korea, targeting Chinese companies [ https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-global-web-that-keeps-north-korea-running-1499358538 ] and banks the U.S. says are funneling cash into Pyongyang’s weapons program.
Sharper rhetoric [ https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-practice-attack-capabilities-with-south-korea-1499486950 ] from high-ranking U.S. officials since North Korea’s July 4 ballistic missile test and recently unsealed court filings offer clues that the White House is ready to use its own powers to constrict the flow of cash to Kim Jung Un’s regime. U.S. officials have expressed a preference for collective action through the United Nations and support from China.
The Justice Department, in a federal-court case that was partly unsealed last week, pointed to “offshore U.S. dollar accounts” associated with a network of five companies linked to Chinese national Chi Yupeng. That included one of the largest importers of North Korean goods into China, Dandong Zhicheng Metallic Material Co.
Citing sources that included two North Korean defectors, the Justice Department said the so-called Chi Yupeng network hid transactions which helped finance North Korea’s military and arms programs.
That network isn’t under U.S. sanctions but analysts say it is a vital source of funds that can be choked off, in the same way the U.S. targeted another Chinese firm late last year, Dandong Hongxiang Industrial Development Co. Ltd. Some of the nearly two dozen Chinese banks that handled allegedly laundered money from Dangdong Hongxiang also could be targeted, analysts said. The company declined to comment at the time.
China’s Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to a request to comment and Mr. Chi and Dandong Zhicheng couldn’t be reached.
North Korea has resisted pressure for years and many experts question whether this time would be any different. Pyongyang has become proficient at evading sanctions, U.S. officials say, including by disguising its international trade and financial entities through firms in China.
The U.S. itself has almost no direct ties to North Korea after imposing wide-ranging bilateral sanctions in response to previous missile and nuclear tests.
China, North Korea’s chief trade partner, has resisted tightening the screws against its neighbor, concerned that it could provoke Pyongyang to lash out against America’s allies in the region or precipitate a collapse of the regime that sparks a flood of refugees, analysts say. The status quo has also provided China a buffer against U.S. power in Asia.
Since raising the pressure on North Korea requires targeting more Chinese firms, unilateral action risks fueling already strained tensions between Washington and Beijing. It could complicate Washington’s efforts to expand access for U.S. companies into the world’s most populous country and win Beijing’s support on other international issues, such as on cyber security and resolving conflicts in the Middle East.
[...]
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-prepares-to-act-alone-against-north-korea-1499707831 [with comments]
Trump flew a pair of bombers over the South China Sea to annoy China
Jul 7, 2017
https://news.vice.com/story/trump-flew-a-pair-of-bombers-over-the-south-china-sea-to-annoy-china
U.S. B-1B Bomber Flights Demonstrate Commitment to South Korea
U.S. Air Force B-1B Lancers assigned to the 9th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron, deployed from Dyess Air Force Base, Texas, fly with South Korean F-15 and U.S. Air Force F-16 fighter jets over the Korean Peninsula, July 7, 2017. The Lancers departed Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, to conduct a sequenced bilateral mission with South Korean F-15s and Japan Air Self-Defense Force F-2 fighter jets.
July 8, 2017
https://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/1241239/us-b-1b-bomber-flights-demonstrate-commitment-to-south-korea/
East China Sea Mission Marks New B-1B Bomber Milestone
A U.S. Air Force B-1B Lancer assigned to the 9th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron deployed from Dyess Air Force Base, Texas, takes off from Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, to fly a bilateral mission with Japanese fighter jets over the East China Sea, July 6, 2017. The mission marked the first time U.S. Pacific Command B-1B Lancers have conducted combined training with Japanese fighters at night.
July 10, 2017
https://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/1241867/east-china-sea-mission-marks-new-b-1b-bomber-milestone/
The Trump White House keeps mixing up and botching] the names of Asian [and other] countries and their leaders’ [names and] titles
July 10, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/08/white-house-press-office-misidentifies-japanese-prime-minister-abe-as-president/ [with embedded video, and comments]
Diplomats: US drafts new sanctions resolution against NKorea
In this Saturday, July 8, 2017, file photo, U.S. President Donald Trump, left, and Chinese President Xi Jinping arrive for a meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany. The United States apologized for mistakenly describing Xi as the leader of Taiwan, China said Monday, July 10, 2017. Chinese scholars said the mistake shows a lack of competence in the White House that is not conducive to healthy U.S.-China relations.
Jul. 10, 2017
https://www.apnews.com/37497f7673c94a4885289f15f59234d2/Diplomats:-US-drafts-new-sanctions-resolution-against-NKorea
U.S. aims for U.N. vote on North Korea sanctions within weeks - diplomats
July 10, 2017
http://in.reuters.com/article/northkorea-missile-un-idINKBN19V28T
Russia submits North Korea missile data to U.N.
A handout photo made available by the official North Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) allegedly shows the North Korean inter-continental ballistic rocket Hwasong-14 being prepared before a test launch on July 4. Moscow claims the projectile is a midrange missile.
July 10, 2017
July 10 (UPI) -- Russia has submitted documents proving the North Korea projectile launched last week was an intermediate-range missile.
Russia's state-run Tass news agency reported the proof was submitted to the United Nations secretariat and contradicts U.S. and South Korea findings that show the Hwasong-14 rocket is an intercontinental ballistic missile, capable of reaching the U.S. mainland.
According to Tass, the Russian documents submitted to the United Nations on Saturday stated the Voronezh radar base in Irkutsk, Russia, tracked the launched of a North Korea midrange ballistic missile on July 4.
Missile flight time was 14 minutes, the maximum altitude reached was 332 miles and flight distance was 317 miles, Russia stated.
Based on the data, the Hwasong-14 is a midrange missile that can hit targets within a 1,240-mile range.
Russia's proof includes a map of the missile flight path.
The move comes after Russia's deputy U.N. Ambassador Vladimir Safronkov said at the U.N. Security Council Moscow's data indicate North Korea launched a midrange projectile, and not an ICBM.
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley challenged the claim.
"Not only has the secretary-general said this was an ICBM and the United States has said this is an ICBM. North Korea has said this is an ICBM. So if you need any sort of intelligence to let you know that the rest of the world sees this as an ICBM, I'm happy to provide it," Haley said.
Russia blocked a U.N. statement urging North Korea sanctions.
The report also calls into question North Korea claims. Pyongyang stated last week the Hwasong-14 flew 580 miles at a maximum altitude of 1,740 miles, and claimed the launch was a "successful" demonstration of ICBM capability.
The claim, if true, means the Hwasong-14's range exceeds 4,900 miles if fired from a normal angle.
ICBMs must have a minimum range of 3,400 miles.
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2017/07/10/Russia-submits-North-Korea-missile-data-to-UN/8811499691892/ [with comments]
US Preps for THAAD Missile Test Against IRBM As North Korean Threat Rises
Long-planned experiment comes amid calls from U.S. officials to broadly expand America's missile defense apparatus.
July 10, 2017
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/12309/us-preps-for-thaad-missile-test-against-irbm-as-north-korean-threat-rises [with embedded videos]
Thaad test set to ratchet up tensions in Korean peninsula
Trump could soon be facing his first major foreign policy crisis, which may require him to make some big decisions on how to tackle Pyongyang.
July 11, 2017
http://www.businesstimes.com.sg/opinion/thaad-test-set-to-ratchet-up-tensions-in-korean-peninsula
U.S. Shoots Down Target in THAAD Anti-Missile Test
The U.S. successfully launches a THAAD interceptor.
The simulation was the first of its kind to successfully hit an intermediate-range ballistic missile.
Jul 11, 2017
The U.S. military conducted a successful test of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile system on Tuesday by shooting down a simulated intermediate-range ballistic missile over the Pacific Ocean. The test signals an improvement in the defense system, which before Tuesday had only intercepted shorter-range missiles. While the simulation was planned for months, it comes amid a growing international threat from North Korea, which tested [ https://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2017/07/north-korea-fires-ballistic-missile-into-sea-of-japan/532638/ ] its first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on July 4.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency released a statement claiming that the latest test “bolsters the country’s defensive capability against developing missile threats in North Korea and other countries around the globe.” North Korea is widely believed to be developing an ICBM capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. Experts say [ http://putting%20u.s.%20cities%20within%20striking%20distance/ ] the nation’s latest tests puts Alaska within striking distance, but is not yet capable of reaching the lower 48 states.
Tuesday’s test was carried out in Kodiak, Alaska, and shot down a ballistic missile target from an aircraft flying north of Hawaii. The simulation adds to a perfect track record of THAAD missile launches since the U.S. resumed testing in 2005. Thus far, THAAD has proven more successful than the nation’s Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, which is designed to target an ICBM. Even after a successful test launch [ https://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2017/05/us-conducts-successful-missile-defense-test/528591/ ] in May, the GMD system has only achieved a 55 percent success rate. While the Pentagon previously reported that the system has a “limited capability to defend the U.S. homeland,” they have since claimed [ http://www.nydailynews.com/newswires/news/national/pentagon-upgrades-assessment-ability-defend-icbms-article-1.3229897 ] that the U.S. is capable of defending itself against a small number of ICBMs.
Unlike the GMD system, the THAAD system is designed to counter short, medium, and intermediate range missile threats. In June, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency announced plans to deliver an additional 52 THAAD interceptors to the U.S. Army between October 2017 and September 2018. The nation has also deployed the system in South Korea and Guam—areas that both contain U.S. military bases. The deployment of THAAD in South Korea has sparked criticism from nations like Russia and China, who accuse the U.S. of attempting to expand its military authority in Asia. North Korea has also called for an end [ https://kcnawatch.co/newstream/1493836333-970228373/consequences-of-thaad-deployment-will-be-miserable-kcna-commentary/ ] to the program, which it considers a threat to regional stability.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2017/07/us-conducts-successful-thaad-missile-test/533310/ [with comments]
The US’s best defense against a North Korean nuke could spark a nuclear war with Russia
Jul. 10, 2017
The US has spent at least $40 billion [ http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-missile-defense-test-20170530-story.html ] on a missile defense system intended to knock down or deter incoming North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles, but actually using the system could lead to an accidental nuclear war with Russia, according to an expert.
Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of Arms Control Wonk, took to Twitter [ https://twitter.com/ArmsControlWonk/status/883459440208297984 ] to detail how the US could find itself exchanging nuclear salvos with Russia if it ever tried to shoot down an incoming North Korean ballistic missile.
The US's Missile Defense Agency, which operates the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) missile shield, told Business Insider in May [ http://www.businessinsider.com/us-icbm-intercept-gmd-north-korea-decoy-salvo-2017-5 ] that in the event of a real incoming threat, they would launch several interceptors to increase the chances of knocking out the missile.
Lewis pegs this figure at about four or five interceptors.
But only one interceptor missile could hit the threat. The others would continue streaking through the high atmosphere towards Russia and China.
The problem is that, in that moment, while US missile defense forces are praying their interceptor hits North Korea's nuclear missile, they're also relying on Russia to be able to tell that the other interceptor missiles aren't a salvo of US nukes.
There's plenty of reason to believe Russia can't do that.
[...]
http://www.businessinsider.com/us-intercept-north-korea-icbm-nuclear-war-russia-2017-7
North Korea's Secret Weapon is Terrible Synth Pop
The Moranbong Band.
Jul 10 2017
Pyongyang, 6 AM. The eerie stillness of the morning is shattered as loudspeakers across the city crack to life with the jarring, dissonant synth tones of "Where Are You, Dear General?" as performed by North Korea's state-sanctioned propaganda orchestra, the Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble. Every day, most of Pyongyang's 2.5 million residents begin their day to the recording blaring into their bedrooms. The song serves as a mandatory alarm for a people bombarded with propaganda through film, art, television, music, and radio, at every juncture of their day.
"There's music everywhere in North Korea: in the workplace, at home, in the streets," says Darren Zook, a professor of political science at UC Berkeley. "North Korean television—which is all state propaganda—doesn't broadcast all day. In periods where there is nothing on, they play propaganda music, continuously, for hours on end. It's considered the duty of a citizen to have their TV on all day so they're hearing that music, just so in the background they are reminded of the presence of the state. It's behavioral conditioning; the eternal reminder that the state is watching."
The music popularized during any period in the country is a reflection of the Kim in power at that time. In the 1970s and 80s, Kim Il Sung preferred staid folk music and orchestral arrangements that glorified Korean history and socialist workers of the world. In the 1990s, Kim Jong -i's paranoid, wonky perspective on modernism shone through in the attempts at outdated synth pop of the Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble, whose tracks have names like "Excellent Horse-Like Lady" and "Song For Tankman." Recently, Kim Jong-un's attempts at replicating the success of South Korean K-Pop have resulted in The Moranbong Band, a 21-piece, all-female NK-pop extravaganza. "None of it's good," laughs Zook, reflecting on the timeline. "It's all bleeding from the ears bad."
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7x9x8d/north-koreas-secret-weapon-is-terrible-synth-pop , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVXSgKYBoE8 [as embedded; with comments], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5tkXgw2OMY [as embedded; with comments], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeKrHSQgN00 [embedded; with comments]
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Trump talking nonsense as Xi, Putin play him
Paul Kelly
12:00AM July 10, 2017
The G20 meeting in Germany has been dismal, disappointing and divisive — an ominous warning of an ineffective America, the retreat of global collaboration and the rise of “nation-first” policies that guarantee more disorder and risk greater military conflict.
The big themes [ http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/turnbull-tells-china-to-rein-in-regime/news-story/8ef66f2e7ec8b3fe6cea1d166cdda70a ] are the sharp decline in American global leadership under Donald Trump creating a power vacuum, the fracture between America and Europe that cripples the moral and political standing of the West, and the opportunistic exploitation of US weakness by the dictators in China and Russia as they feel the times suit them.
The triumphant boasts of Trump that the G20 meeting was a “wonderful success” are a pathetic nonsense. Trump left Germany having gained next to nothing on North Korea and having tried next to nothing.
Trump’s supposed friends, the Europeans, publicise their distaste bordering on contempt for him. After giving the US concessions in the communique, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the disagreements had to be made clear and deplored Trump’s quitting the climate-change agreement. French President Emmanuel Macron said: “Our world has never been so divided. Centrifugal forces have never been so powerful. Our common goods have never been so threatened.”
The double takeout from this meeting is that Trump’s “America first” template will shatter US influence and authority — and on this brand of politics he will be outclassed by President Xi Jinping’s “China-first” and President Vladimir Putin’s “Russia-first” ingrained strategies. They are professionals at this game while Trump is the amateur.
The meeting reveals an America seemingly devoid of any coherent strategy to handle the world’s pivotal problems — Trump, riven with contradictions, seems to grasp he must enlist other nations but seems incapable of doing so.
It is the confidence with which China and Russia manage him that is alarming.
On North Korea Trump is left with the logic yet futility of putting pressure on China to bring Kim Jong-un to major concessions while the Chinese — on whom North Korean economic survival depends — refuse for their own geo-strategic reasons. Before the G20 meeting China and Russia jointly called on North Korea to halt missile tests and for the US to abandon a missile shield and military exercises with South Korea. Their message: the US needs to back off.
The Russians have every reason to be pleased. They came to the G20 with a strategy to create a working dialogue with Trump and they got it. Trump called his first meeting with Putin “tremendous”. Putin’s lust is for the US President to treat him as a power equal — and he may have got that.
The limited ceasefire they agreed on Syria suits Putin. After the meeting he called the Syrian deal “a massive step forward”. Putin knows his Trump and played the flattery card: “Trump’s TV persona differs sharply from the real man,” Putin purred. “He is a very straightforward person.” Hail Putin, defender of Trump to his critics.
“As for relations on a personal level, I believe we have established them,” Putin said. Trump seems to concur. They disagreed on whether Trump accepted Putin’s denial of illegal intervention in the US election — but the Russians have probably succeeded in stirring up more trouble for Trump on this issue back home.
Trump’s much-hailed Warsaw speech was a magnificent tribute to the Poles and a ringing defence of Western civilisation, but one speech cannot redeem a failed polity. That Trump waited till he got an adoring audience in Warsaw before making an unequivocal declaration of support for NATO betrays his unreliability.
He said it in Warsaw but refused to say it in Brussels. Does he have a different NATO policy depending where he is? Recall that in Brussels standing before a 9/11 memorial, Trump, in a despicable effort, declined to pledge to the NATO mutual defence principle. This is a president who thinks creating angst, antagonising allies and switching position is clever.
At the G20 Trump said other countries were largely to blame for the US trade deficit with individual nations. It is his pet obsession. The White House threatens to restrict steel imports and is targeting China. The G20 said it would address Trump’s concerns. But the ultimate message from other leaders was defiance — they told Trump if he went protectionist they would retaliate.
Trump won concessions in the communique for his position on trade. But his claim of victimhood is a sad rejection of longstanding US declaratory support for free trade. The macabre joke is that Xi and Putin now pose as apostles of open trade.
On climate change it was formalised: 19 against one. Merkel, despite her responsibility as host, did not conceal her dismay and said she was “gratified to note that the other 19 members of the G20 feel the Paris Agreement is irreversible”.
On both trade and climate change Malcolm Turnbull was with the majority against Trump. He would not be so inept to frame the differences this way but that is the reality. Indeed, under Turnbull, ties with Germany and France have reached a zenith, another reminder that Australia runs a global foreign policy.
Optimists suggest that Trump is evolving into a type of Reaganite president. That would be wonderful news but is surely too ambitious. Small mercies would do — mere coherence and consistency would constitute a breakthrough event for America and the world.
Trump seemed to enjoy himself at the G20 and lavished praise everywhere at its conclusion. Yet he has no time for the global institutions and his instincts rebel against a multilateral approach to global challenges. Every report from the meeting suggests Trump was inept in this forum. That would be tolerable if he had an alternative strategy based upon an intelligent national-interest driven realpolitik. But he doesn’t.
Trump prides himself as a deal-making transactional leader but his opponents at this level, Xi and Putin, are in a class he has never previously encountered despite their running countries that lack equivalent power to the US.
Australia needs the G20 to work and thrive. This is the vital summit where we sit at the head table, a place Australia has never previously occupied. Turnbull went with an initiative on better control of tech companies to curb use of the internet on behalf of terrorists and progress was made on that front.
But the overall task facing Turnbull is extremely difficult. The international system is being battered by a challenging combination of technological, strategic and political disruptions. Australia needs to remain constructive, shore up its defences and maximise its coalitions of shared interest.
Copyright The Australian
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/trump-talking-nonsense-as-xi-and-putin-play-for-keeps/news-story/63eb25104ef668721a89e9c633832905 [with comments]
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China’s only Nobel Peace Prize winner died in state custody. Hours later, Trump praised Xi Jinping.
A pro-democracy activist mourns the death of Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo outside China's Liaison Office in Hong Kong on July 13.
July 14, 2017
Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo died Thursday [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinese-nobel-laureate-liu-xiaobo-called-a-monument-to-morality/2017/07/13/bde11b7a-6770-11e7-83d7-7a628c56bde7_story.html ] at age 61. Liu was one of his country's best-known dissidents and became the only Chinese national to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. But his activism against one-party rule came at a huge personal cost: When he won the Nobel, he was in the middle of a lengthy prison sentence for his promotion of democracy.
Liu was granted medical parole in late June as the Chinese government revealed that he had late-stage liver cancer, but he died under the close guard of authorities. He is the first Nobel Peace Prize winner to die in state custody since 1938, when German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky died after years in Nazi Germany's concentration camps.
The circumstances of Liu's death drew commiseration from around the world. However, the response from the leader of the United States was comparatively muted. The White House released a short statement Thursday that said President Trump was “deeply saddened” by the news of Liu's death, noting that he was a “poet, scholar and courageous advocate” who had “dedicated his life to the pursuit of democracy and liberty.”
Many activists said that the White House statement was undercut by comments Trump himself made earlier in the day. The president had been holding a news conference in Paris with French President Emmanuel Macron when a reporter asked him what he thought personally of Xi Jinping, the Chinese president.
“Well, he’s a friend of mine,” Trump responded [ https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/07/13/remarks-president-trump-and-president-macron-france-joint-press ]. “I have great respect for him. We’ve gotten to know each other very well. A great leader. He’s a very talented man. I think he’s a very good man. He loves China, I can tell you. He loves China. He wants to do what’s right for China.”
Xi has been leader of China since 2013 and oversaw the country during four years of Liu's detention. Activists say that under Xi, the Chinese state has grown more repressive and activists more threatened.
“The future for human rights in China gets ever bleaker under the leadership of President Xi Jinping,” Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, said this year [ https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/01/12/china-deepening-assault-human-rights ]. “The authorities have targeted rights-promoting groups and boldly strengthened efforts to control them.”
Though Trump has frequently criticized China for its trade policies and economic relationship with North Korea, he has shied away from commenting on human rights abuses in the country. The U.S. president has met with Xi a number of times and spoken warmly of his personal relationship with him on a number of occasions.
Trump's praise for Xi is disappointing to many Chinese activists.
“Trump has shown so little interest in human rights since he came to power, and sometimes he even shows contempt for human rights issues,” Hu Jia, a prominent Chinese dissident and Liu family friend, told the Guardian [ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/14/death-of-liu-xiaobo-activists-scorn-trump-for-hailing-terrific-xi ] newspaper.
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/07/14/chinas-only-nobel-peace-prize-winner-died-in-state-custody-hours-later-trump-praised-xi-jinping/ [with comments]
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Trump left in cold over Paris climate agreement at end of G20 summit
Donald Trump and Angela Merkel attend a panel discussion on the second day of the G20 summit in Hamburg on Saturday.
All other world leaders sign declaration that deal is irreversible after US withdrawal sparks standoff in Hamburg
8 July 2017
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/08/donald-trump-paris-climate-agreement-g20-summit-us-theresa-may [with embedded video]
Climate at the G20: Six Degrees of U.S. Isolation
Nineteen of the G20 leaders stated their strong commitment to dealing with climate change. U.S. President Donald Trump's opposition was left as a footnote.
The latest G20 documents illustrate how far the Trump administration's climate change views are from those of the rest of the world.
Jul 10, 2017
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10072017/g20-climate-change-paris-agreement-ambition-fossil-fuel-subsidies-trump-isolated
Trump is isolated - and the days of fossil fuel are running out
The majority of the world’s richest nations recognise the urgency of the climate change crisis and are ready to act
by Anne Hidalgo | Mayor of Paris
10 July 2017
http://news.trust.org/item/20170710053758-zumf9/
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Larsen C calves trillion tonne iceberg
Smoking gun, the #LarsenC iceberg has broken free! @ESA_EO @BAS_News @NERCscience #Sentinel1
8:14 AM - 12 Jul 2017
[ https://twitter.com/CPOM_news/status/885110103325769728 (no comments yet), via https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/12/giant-antarctic-iceberg-breaks-free-of-larsen-c-ice-shelf (with comments)]
A map of the Larsen C ice shelf, overlaid with a NASA thermal image from July 12, shows where the iceberg has calved.
[ http://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/massive-iceberg-breaks-antarctica-one-scientist-says-it-s-suspicious-n782231 ]
July 12, 2017
A one trillion tonne iceberg – one of the biggest ever recorded - has calved away from the Larsen C Ice Shelf in Antarctica. The calving occurred sometime between Monday 10th July and Wednesday 12th July 2017, when a 5,800 square km section of Larsen C finally broke away. The iceberg, which is likely to be named A68, weighs more than a trillion tonnes. Its volume is twice that of Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes.
[...]
http://www.projectmidas.org/blog/calving/ [and see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=126997578 and preceding (and any future following)]
Brief Communication: Newly developing rift in Larsen C Ice Shelf presents significant risk to stability
15 Jun 2015
Abstract
An established rift in the Larsen C Ice Shelf, formerly constrained by a suture zone containing marine ice, grew rapidly during 2014 and is likely in the near future to generate the largest calving event since the 1980s and result in a new minimum area for the ice shelf. Here we investigate the recent development of the rift, quantify the projected calving event and, using a numerical model, assess its likely impact on ice shelf stability. We find that the ice front is at risk of becoming unstable when the anticipated calving event occurs.
http://www.the-cryosphere.net/9/1223/2015/ [id.]
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Trump leaves leaders fearing the future as G-20 summit closes
By Michael Birnbaum and Damian Paletta
July 8, 2017
HAMBURG — President Trump and other world leaders on Saturday emerged from two days of talks unable to resolve key differences on core issues such as climate change and globalization, slapping an exclamation point on a divisive summit that left other nations fearing for the future of global alliances in the Trump era.
The scale of disharmony was remarkable for the annual Group of 20 meeting of world economic powers, a venue better known for sleepy bromides about easy-to-agree-on issues. Even as negotiators made a good-faith effort to bargain toward consensus, European leaders said that a chasm has opened between the United States and the rest of the world.
“Our world has never been so divided,” French President Emmanuel Macron said as the talks broke up. “Centrifugal forces have never been so powerful. Our common goods have never been so threatened.”
The divisions were most bitter on climate change, where 19 leaders formed a unified front against Trump. But even in areas of nominal compromise, such as trade, top European leaders said they have little faith that an agreement forged today could hold tomorrow.
Macron said world leaders found common ground on terrorism but were otherwise split on numerous important topics. He also said there were rising concerns about “authoritarian regimes, and even within the Western world, there are real divisions and uncertainties that didn’t exist just a few short years ago.”
“I will not concede anything in the direction of those who are pushing against multilateralism,” Macron said, without directly referring to Trump. “We need better coordination, more coordination. We need those organizations that were created out of the Second World War. Otherwise, we will be moving back toward narrow-minded nationalism.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who hosted the summit in the port city of Hamburg, said there had been some areas of agreement. But she did little to hide her disappointment about U.S. actions on climate change.
“Wherever there is no consensus that can be achieved, disagreement has to be made clear,” Merkel said at the end of the summit. “Unfortunately — and I deplore this — the United States of America left the climate agreement.”
“I am gratified to note that the other 19 members of the G-20 feel the Paris agreement is irreversible,” Merkel said.
Perhaps as a way to emphasize global unity — minus the United States — Macron announced there would be another climate summit in Paris in December to mark the two-year anniversary of the climate accord.
On trade, G-20 leaders agreed to try to address what the White House claims is a global steel glut. Trump officials have threatened to restrict steel imports, risking the start of a global trade war, after it has repeatedly alleged that China subsidizes the industry, which helps it lower prices and put U.S. steel jobs at risk.
The promises to draw up policy changes on steel production were a victory, White House officials said.
But with the U.S. decision to impose steel restrictions still up in the air, Merkel said Saturday’s agreements did little to resolve the future.
“The negotiations remain difficult, but we have been able to get satisfactory results in place,” Merkel said. “Now, what’s going to happen tomorrow or the day after, I cannot make any predictions on.”
One official said that Europeans were sharply unsettled by their encounters with Trump — and they recognized that may be the intention of the White House.
“It seems clear that President Trump is committed to being less predictable and not necessarily seeing predictability as positive in foreign policy,” said the European official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly assess the White House.
The summit came after Trump softened his opposition to some other multilateral institutions. After challenging the NATO defense alliance, he endorsed its all-for-one, one-for-all principles just ahead of the G-20 summit. And Trump has agreed to abide by the North American Free Trade Agreement, so long as it can be renegotiated.
White House officials also saw the potential to draw a win from the Hamburg summit, even if their expectations were measured. They hoped to explain Trump’s priorities and find compromises, even small ones.
Their assessment of the outcome was sharply different from Merkel and Macron’s cautious tone.
“It’s been a really great success,” a senior White House official who was not authorized to speak on the record said Saturday before Trump departed for the United States. “We are going to get some of the priorities of the administration” out of this summit.
White House officials pointed to several minor changes to the G-20’s official statement on trade policy, saying it better reflects the Trump administration’s point of view.
“We recognise that the benefits of international trade and investment have not been shared widely enough,” the G-20 countries said in a joint statement. “We need to better enable our people to seize the opportunities.”
Similar language was not in the G-20 agreement in 2016 before Trump’s election.
The White House also won a bitter battle over its desire to include language that promoted U.S. fossils fuels in the final statement — wording that European leaders sharply opposed.
Trump also prodded other countries to intensify a review of the overproduction of steel, something Trump alleges has ravaged the U.S. steel industry because it cannot compete with cheaper prices from countries such as China. In response to the White House push, the G-20 agreed to share information about steel production by August and to publish a formal report with recommendations by November. There probably will not be consequences if the deadlines are missed, but it creates a formal process for the White House to amplify its complaints.
Global steel manufacturing has soared, with China accounting for half the world’s production, compared with 15 percent in 2000, although the United States imports relatively little from China. Beijing agreed to the new G-20 steel requirements on Saturday.
Although the shifts may constitute short-term victories for Trump, one former senior official with the International Monetary Fund said Washington may have incurred long-term losses.
“It comes at a cost of eroding U.S. leadership,” said Eswar Prasad, a senior professor at Cornell University. “If even in calm times such rifts are exposed, it could make it more complicated for the group to work together in more complicated circumstances.”
Trump also had the chance to forge one-on-one relationships with leaders as the summit unfolded around him. It included his first face-to-face meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which stretched more than two hours, and also his first post-election meeting with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.
Relations between the United States and Mexico have been strained since Trump took office, in part because of the U.S. leader’s insistence that Mexico would pay for the creation of a new wall along the U.S. border. When reporters were briefly allowed in the room for their meeting on Friday and he was asked whether he still wanted Mexico to pay for the wall, Trump responded “absolutely.”
Peña Nieto did not agree to pay for the construction of the wall during the meeting, and a person briefed on the discussions said Trump did not press the issue during their talks.
There were other signs that Trump enjoyed the visit. At a dinner and reception for world leaders and their spouses Friday night, Trump was among the last to leave. At an event Saturday morning to announce an initiative to fund female entrepreneurship, Trump called Merkel “incredible,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “spectacular,” and declared that World Bank President Jim Yong Kim “would be a great appointment.”
On Twitter, Trump called the summit a “wonderful success” that was “carried out beautifully” by Merkel. He also said he had “an excellent meeting on trade & North Korea” with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Still, Trump did little to celebrate the G-20’s outcome. President Barack Obama typically marked the end of global summits with a news conference, weighing in on issues he and other leaders discussed.
And on Saturday, many other world leaders, including Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, held lengthy briefings with reporters in Hamburg.
Trump had a different plan. When the summit ended, the president and his aides got in their motorcade, went right to the airport and flew back to the United States.
Isaac Stanley-Becker and Abby Phillip contributed to this report.
© 2017 The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-leaves-leaders-fearing-the-future-as-g-20-summit-breaks/2017/07/08/daed41be-634f-11e7-84a1-a26b75ad39fe_story.html [with embedded videos, and (approaching 5,000) comments]
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Will Trump Start a Trade War?
The president’s decision on steel will serve as a telling sign.
Jul 11, 2017
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/trump-bannon-steel/533196/ [with comments]
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Donald Trump 'has no desire and no capacity to lead the world', Chris Uhlmann says
Published on Jul 9, 2017 by ABC News (Australia) [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVgO39Bk5sMo66-6o6Spn6Q / https://www.youtube.com/user/NewsOnABC , https://www.youtube.com/user/NewsOnABC/videos ]
At G20, Donald Trump underlined he has neither the desire nor the capacity to lead the world and you got the strong sense some leaders were trying to find the best way to work around him, says Chris Uhlmann.
Read more here: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-09/did-trumps-g20-performance-indicate-us-decline-as-world-power/8691538
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6_ckWZCHW4 [comments disabled] [and see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132836992 and preceding and following]
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The Trump Vision for America Abroad
President Trump at the G-20 summit conference in Hamburg, Germany, this month.
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
By GARY D. COHN and H. R. McMASTER
JULY 13, 2017
President Trump just concluded a second overseas trip to further advance America’s interests and values, and to strengthen our alliances around the world. Both this and his first trip demonstrated the resurgence of American leadership to bolster common interests, affirm shared values, confront mutual threats and achieve renewed prosperity.
Discussions with world leaders highlighted extraordinary potential: vast supplies of affordable energy, untapped markets that can be opened to new commerce, a growing number of young people seeking the chance to build better futures in their homelands and new partnerships among nations that can form the basis for lasting peace. At every opportunity abroad, President Trump articulated his vision for securing the American homeland, enhancing American prosperity and advancing American influence.
Meetings in Poland and at the Group of 20 summit conference in Germany focused on building coalitions to get the best possible outcomes for America and for our allies. The United States cannot be a passive member of international organizations. We are working with friends to confront common threats, seize mutually beneficial opportunities and press for solutions to shared problems.
In Warsaw, President Trump spoke to the Polish people and reiterated our commitment to mutual support and defense of Poland and our NATO allies against common threats. He affirmed that a “strong Poland is a blessing to Europe” and that “a strong Europe is a blessing to the West and to the world.”
He also met with 12 leaders of the Three Seas nations and pledged America’s commitment to expanding access to affordable and reliable energy in the Baltic States, Central Europe and the Balkans. Helping countries diversify their energy sources strengthens economies, creates jobs and prevents adversaries from using energy to intimidate or coerce. During a dinner President Trump hosted with President Moon Jae-in of South Korea and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan in Hamburg, the leaders agreed on a common strategy to confront the threat of North Korea and ensure the security of Northeast Asia and the United States.
Central to President Trump’s approach is that the United States will seek areas of agreement and cooperation while still protecting American interests. At the G-20, the United States supported open trade but insisted that it be fair. The G-20 communiqué [ https://www.g20.org/Content/EN/_Anlagen/G20/G20-leaders-declaration.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=2 ] recognized “the importance of reciprocal and mutually advantageous trade,” and all leaders agreed to do more to eliminate excess capacity in industrial sectors such as steel. Because of American leadership, all G-20 nations joined together in making an urgent call “for the removal of market distorting subsidies and other types of support by governments” to “foster a truly level playing field.”
The G-20 leaders agreed that a strong economy and a healthy planet are mutually reinforcing. America will continue to lead by example in demonstrating that market forces and technology-driven solutions are the most effective means of protecting the environment while fueling economic growth.
On migration, the leaders reaffirmed the “sovereign right of states to manage and control their borders.” They discussed the need to “address the root causes of displacement” and create better opportunities for people to remain in their home countries and rebuild their communities.
Perhaps most important, President Trump affirmed on this trip that America First is grounded in American values — values that not only strengthen America but also drive progress throughout the world. America champions the dignity of every person, affirms the equality of women, celebrates innovation, protects freedom of speech and of religion, and supports free and fair markets.
For example, to help empower women across the globe, the United States joined with the World Bank in an initiative to provide more than $1 billion to advance entrepreneurship. This effort will help women in developing countries gain increased access to the capital, markets and networks needed to start and grow businesses in the modern economy. And the United States remains the world’s single largest source of humanitarian assistance. At the G-20, we committed an additional $639 million to help save the lives of the millions of people threatened by famine — and called on other nations to join us in doing more to address this humanitarian catastrophe.
Of course, the United States — along with nations around the world — continues to face serious challenges, including the menace of terrorism and the threat of rogue regimes. Working with other nations allows us our best opportunity to address these challenges. For example, in a meeting with President Joko Widodo of Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, the two leaders affirmed the commitment made in Saudi Arabia to block funding for terrorists and those who advance their hateful ideology. In the formal communiqué [ http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_STATEMENT-17-1955_en.htm ] on countering terrorism, all G-20 nations affirmed that we “strongly condemn all terrorist attacks worldwide and stand united and firm in the fight against terrorism and its financing.” In many discussions with allies and partners at the G-20, leaders agreed that North Korea is a global threat that requires collective action.
America First is rooted in confidence that our values are worth defending and promoting. This is a time of great challenge for our friends and allies around the globe — but it is also a moment of extraordinary opportunity. The American delegation returned from the trip with tremendous optimism about the future and what the United States, our allies and our partners can achieve together.
Gary D. Cohn is the director of the National Economic Council. Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster is the national security adviser.
© 2017 The New York Times Company
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/opinion/the-trump-vision-for-america-abroad.html [with comments]
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Poll: Negative Campaign Against Arabs And Muslims Has Consequences
Jonathan Ernst / Reuters
By James Zogby
07/08/2017 09:21 am ET | Updated July 10, 2017
While, as president, Donald Trump has worked to cultivate a relationship with Arab leaders, the antipathy towards Arabs and Muslims that he and his party have cultivated in recent years continues to have a worrisome impact on American public opinion and policy.
Recent polling [ https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/aai/pages/12443/attachments/original/1499692427/2017_AAI_American_Attitudes_Poll.pdf ] conducted three weeks after Trump’s summits in Saudi Arabia, establishes the persistence of a deep and disturbing partisan divide in American attitudes toward Arabs and Muslims. On many questions, the views of Democrats and Republicans are exactly the opposite of one another, with Republican attitudes toward the two communities being extremely negative and the views of Democrats being overwhelming positive. For example, even after Trump’s visit, only 18% of Republicans have a favorable view of Muslims while only 20% have favorable views of Arabs. This stands in marked contrast to the 59% and 58% of Democrats who are favorably inclined toward Muslims and Arabs, respectively.
These are some of the observations that can be gleaned from the latest Zogby Analytics poll conducted for the Arab American Institute in mid-June of this year. The AAI/ZA poll surveyed 1,012 voters nationwide.
AAI/ZA have annually examined US opinion on these issues for two decades in order to better understand attitudes toward Arabs and Muslims and the challenges faced by Arab Americans and American Muslims. As a result, it is possible to observe changes over time.
It was during the 2010 congressional elections that the GOP first attempted to exploit fear of Muslims for partisan political purposes. While the effort did not have an appreciable impact on the election, itself, the continuation of this effort during the next two election cycles has resulted a sizable shift in Republican attitudes not only toward Arabs and Muslims, but Americans either of Arab ancestry or the Muslim faith.
AAI/ZA polling conducted in December of 2015 [ http://www.aaiusa.org/american_attitudes_toward_arabs_and_muslims_2015 ], after 6 years of anti-Muslim campaigning, shows the “mirror image” effect in place with Democrats recording 47% favorable/28% unfavorable attitudes toward American Muslims as compared with Republican’s 25% favorable/53% unfavorable attitudes.
If there has been any “Trump effect” on attitudes, it has been to increase the favorable attitudes of Democrats toward Arabs and Muslims. For example, Democrats’ favorable attitudes toward Arab Americans increased from 51% in 2015 to 58% this year, while the positive rating given to American Muslims jumped from 47% to 61%. Meanwhile, Republican favorable attitudes toward American Muslims remained at a low 25%, while dropping from 34% in 2015 to 31% for Arab Americans.
Even more pronounced are the differences in attitudes between those who identify as Trump voters versus those who say they voted for Hillary Clinton. Clinton supporters give a 62% favorable rating to Arab Americans and a 64% rating to American Muslims. Only 32% of Trump supporters view Arab Americans positively and only 28% rate American Muslims positively.
This is not just a question of “liking or not liking” the two communities, these negative attitudes have consequences for government policy. With Republicans in control of the White House, Congress, and most state governments, the attitudes of the Republican voters matter to GOP officeholders.
What our polling shows is that on issues that affect the lives of Arab Americans and American Muslims ranging from immigration to civil liberties, the partisan divide is substantial and explains, in part, Republican support for policies hostile to both groups.
For example, while a plurality of Americans (48% to 30%) oppose restricting rights in the name of security, Republicans and Trump voters are in favor of such policies. And while Americans are evenly divided on whether law enforcement are justified in using ethnic or religious profiling in dealing with Arab Americans and American Muslims, Republicans and Trump voters support such profiling by greater than four to one (in the case of Trump voters 63% in favor with only 14% opposed).
And while a significant majority of all Americans agree that there has been an increase in discrimination and hate against Arab Americans and American Muslims, breaking down the numbers we find a huge partisan divide. For example, in response to the question “is there an increase of discrimination against Arab Americans” 53% say “yes”, 20% say “no” (Democrats are 73% “yes”/10% “no”; while Trump voters are 31% “yes”/39% “no”).
The same divide is in evidence with regard to Trump’s proposals to ban immigrants and travelers who are Muslim or who are from Middle East countries, especially Syria. By a margin of 45% to 31%, American voters oppose such a ban, while Republicans strongly support a ban by a margin of 50% for it to only 24% opposed.
As we have found in previous polling, these negative attitudes not only increase the prospect of hate crimes being committed against both communities (note: hate crimes against both have increased dramatically in the past year), they also translate into suspicion about whether or not Arab Americans or American Muslims can be trusted to faithfully perform their duties if appointed to a government post. In December of 2015 we found that 48% of Republicans had no confidence that an Arab American could be trusted in such a post, while 63% had no confidence that an American Muslim could be trusted.
This situation is of deep concern to Arab Americans and American Muslims. We have, in the past, experienced discrimination, been victims of hate crimes, and endured painful political exclusion. It is clear that sustained hostile campaigns either by hardline supporters of Israel or, now, by some leading Republicans have taken a toll on our communities. They must be combated until our political discourse is freed from the scourge of hate, negative stereotyping, and scapegoating.
©2017 Oath Inc. Part of HuffPost • HPMG News
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/poll-negative-campaign-against-arabs-and-muslims-has_us_595fedd7e4b085e766b512a5 [no comments yet]
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Foreign students cool on US, UK after Trump, Brexit: report
More Chinese students are going to school in the US since Trump became president, according to the report.
Canada popular with Indian students; Chinese still favor US despite wider trends
July 9, 2017
Donald Trump’s election as president and Britain’s decision to exit the European Union has chilled foreign students on studying at US and UK colleges and universities, according to a report [ https://21tqmu3jseyp1msxha2oh5wz-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Brexit-report-June-2017.pdf ] by Hotcourses Group.
The global web-based course and university search service says Indian and Middle Eastern students seem especially leery of studying in the US in light of the political climate stirred by Trump’s election and travel bans promulgated against citizens from some Muslim nations.
The release of “Brexit Report: How has global demand for higher education shifted over the last 12 months?” also follows several shooting incidents in the US in which Indian Americans have been killed in suspected cases of anti-immigrant violence.
[...]
http://www.atimes.com/article/foreign-students-cool-us-uk-trump-brexit-report/ [with comment]
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SPECIAL REPORT with Alex Jones - Message To The Left About Donald Trump
Published on Jul 8, 2017 by Ron Gibson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBSpHkA7Jqw [with comments] [no official Alex Jones upload (yet) at https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel/videos ] [a must-watch]
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Trump Team Met With Lawyer Linked to Kremlin During Campaign
President Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. in January.
Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
By JO BECKER, MATT APUZZO and ADAM GOLDMAN
JULY 8, 2017
Update: The Times is now reporting that Donald Trump Jr. was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before the meeting. Read the story [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/09/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html (in full, second below)].
Two weeks after Donald J. Trump [ http://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/donald-trump ] clinched the Republican presidential nomination last year, his eldest son arranged a meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan with a Russian lawyer who has connections to the Kremlin, according to confidential government records described to The New York Times.
The previously unreported meeting was also attended by Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman at the time, Paul J. Manafort, as well as the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, according to interviews and the documents, which were outlined by people familiar with them.
While President Trump has been dogged by revelations of undisclosed meetings between his associates and Russians, this episode at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, is the first confirmed private meeting between a Russian national and members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle during the campaign. It is also the first time that his son Donald Trump Jr. is known to have been involved in such a meeting.
Representatives of Donald Trump Jr. and Mr. Kushner confirmed the meeting after The Times approached them with information about it. In a statement, Donald Jr. described the meeting as primarily about an adoption program. The statement did not address whether the presidential campaign was discussed.
American intelligence agencies have concluded [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/us/politics/russia-hack-report.html ] that Russian hackers and propagandists worked to tip the election toward Mr. Trump, and a special prosecutor and congressional committees are now investigating whether his campaign associates colluded with Russians. Mr. Trump has disputed that, but the investigation has cast a shadow over his administration for months.
Mr. Trump has also equivocated on whether the Russians were solely responsible for the hacking. But in Germany on Friday, meeting President Vladimir V. Putin for the first time as president, Mr. Trump questioned him about the hacking [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/world/europe/trump-putin-g20.html ]. The Russian leader denied meddling in the election.
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.
Natalia Veselnitskaya
The adoption impasse is a frequently used talking point for opponents of the Magnitsky Act. Ms. Veselnitskaya’s campaign against the law has also included attempts to discredit its namesake, Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer and auditor who died in mysterious circumstances in a Russian prison in 2009 after exposing one of the biggest corruption scandals during Mr. Putin’s rule.
Ms. Veselnitskaya was formerly married to a former deputy transportation minister of the Moscow region, and her clients include state-owned businesses and a senior government official’s son, whose company was under investigation in the United States at the time of the meeting. Her activities and associations had previously drawn the attention of the F.B.I., according to a former senior law enforcement official.
In his statement, Donald Trump Jr. said: “It was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up.”
He added: “I was asked to attend the meeting by an acquaintance, but was not told the name of the person I would be meeting with beforehand.”
Late Saturday, Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the president’s lawyer, issued a statement implying that the meeting was a setup. Ms. Veselnitskaya and the translator who accompanied her to the meeting “misrepresented who they were,” it said.
In an interview, Mr. Corallo explained that Ms. Veselnitskaya, in her anti-Magnitsky campaign, employs a private investigator whose firm, Fusion GPS, produced an intelligence dossier [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/us/politics/donald-trump-russia-intelligence.html ] that contained unproven allegations [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/us/politics/trump-intelligence-report-explainer.html ] against the president. The firm could not be reached for comment.
Donald Trump Jr. had denied participating in any campaign-related meetings with Russian nationals when he was interviewed by The Times in March. “Did I meet with people that were Russian? I’m sure, I’m sure I did,” he said. “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.”
Asked at that time whether he had ever discussed government policies related to Russia, the younger Mr. Trump replied, “A hundred percent no.”
Paul Manafort at the Republican National Convention last year in Cleveland.
Eric Thayer for The New York Times
The Trump Tower meeting was not disclosed to government officials until recently, when Mr. Kushner, who is also a senior White House aide, filed a revised version of a form required to obtain a security clearance. The Times reported in April [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/us/politics/jared-kushner-russians-security-clearance.html ] that he had failed to disclose any foreign contacts, including meetings with the Russian ambassador to the United States and the head of a Russian state bank. Failure to report such contacts can result in a loss of access to classified information and even, if information is knowingly falsified or concealed, in imprisonment.
Mr. Kushner’s advisers said at the time that the omissions were an error, and that he had immediately notified the F.B.I. that he would be revising the filing. They also said he had met with the Russians in his official transition capacity as a main point of contact for foreign officials.
In a statement on Saturday, Mr. Kushner’s lawyer, Jamie Gorelick, said: “He has since submitted this information, including that during the campaign and transition, he had over 100 calls or meetings with representatives of more than 20 countries, most of which were during transition. Mr. Kushner has submitted additional updates and included, out of an abundance of caution, this meeting with a Russian person, which he briefly attended at the request of his brother-in-law Donald Trump Jr. As Mr. Kushner has consistently stated, he is eager to cooperate and share what he knows.”
Mr. Kushner’s lawyers addressed questions about his disclosure but deferred to Donald Trump Jr. on questions about the meeting itself.
Mr. Manafort, the former campaign chairman, also recently disclosed the meeting, and Donald Trump Jr.’s role in organizing it, to congressional investigators who had questions about his foreign contacts, according to people familiar with the events.
A spokesman for Mr. Manafort declined to comment. In response to questions, Ms. Veselnitskaya said the meeting lasted about 30 minutes and focused on the Magnitsky Act and the adoption issue.
“Nothing at all was discussed about the presidential campaign,” she said, adding, “I have never acted on behalf of the Russian government and have never discussed any of these matters with any representative of the Russian government.”
Because Donald Trump Jr. does not serve in the administration and does not have a security clearance, he was not required to disclose his foreign contacts. Federal and congressional investigators have not publicly asked for any records that would require his disclosure of Russian contacts. It is not clear whether the Justice Department was aware of the meeting before Mr. Kushner disclosed it recently. Neither Mr. Kushner nor Mr. Manafort was required to disclose the content of the meeting in their government filings.
During the campaign, Donald Trump Jr. served as a close adviser to his father, frequently appearing at campaign events. Since the president took office, the younger Mr. Trump and his brother, who have worked for the Trump Organization for most of their adult lives, assumed day-to-day control of their father’s real estate empire.
A quick internet search reveals Ms. Veselnitskaya as a formidable operator with a history of pushing the Kremlin’s agenda. Most notable is her campaign against the Magnitsky Act, which provoked a Cold War-style, tit-for-tat row with the Kremlin when President Barack Obama signed it into law in 2012.
Under the law, some 44 Russian citizens have been put on a list that allows the United States to seize their American assets and deny them visas. The United States asserts that many of them are connected to fraud exposed by Mr. Magnitsky, who after being jailed for more than a year was found dead in his cell. A Russian human rights panel found that he had been assaulted. To critics of Mr. Putin, Mr. Magnitsky, in death, became a symbol of corruption and brutality in the Russian state.
An infuriated Mr. Putin has called the law an “outrageous act,” and, in addition to banning American adoptions, compiled what became known as an “anti-Magnitsky” blacklist of United States citizens.
Among those blacklisted was Preet Bharara, then the United States attorney in Manhattan, who led high-profile convictions of Russian arms and drug dealers. Mr. Bharara was abruptly fired [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/us/politics/preet-bharara-us-attorney.html ] in March, after previously being asked to stay on by Mr. Trump.
One of Ms. Veselnitskaya’s clients is Denis Katsyv, the Russian owner of a Cyprus-based investment company called Prevezon Holdings. He is the son of Petr Katsyv, the vice president of the state-owned Russian Railways and a former deputy governor of the Moscow region. In a civil forfeiture case prosecuted by Mr. Bharara’s office, the Justice Department alleged that Prevezon had helped launder money tied to a $230 million corruption scheme exposed by Mr. Magnitsky by parking it in New York real estate and bank accounts. As a result, the government froze $14 million of its assets. Prevezon recently settled the case for $6 million without admitting wrongdoing.
Ms. Veselnitskaya and her client hired a team of political and legal operatives that has worked unsuccessfully in Washington to repeal the Magnitsky Act. They also tried but failed to keep Mr. Magnitsky’s name off a new law that takes aim at human-rights abusers across the globe.
Besides the private investigator whose firm produced the Trump dossier, the lobbying team included Rinat Akhmetshin, an émigré to the United States who once served as a Soviet military officer and who has been called a Russian political gun for hire.
Ms. Veselnitskaya was also deeply involved in the making of an anti-Magnitsky film [ https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/10/world/europe/sergei-magnitsky-russia-vladimir-putin.html ] that premiered just weeks before the Trump Tower meeting. Titled “The Magnitsky Act — Behind the Scenes,” the film echoes the Kremlin line that the widely accepted version of Mr. Magnitsky’s life and death is wrong. The film claims that he was not assaulted and alleges that he never testified that government officials conspired to steal $230 million in fraudulent tax rebates.
In the film’s telling, the true culprit of the fraud was William F. Browder, an American-born financier who hired Mr. Magnitsky to investigate the fraud after he had three of his investment funds companies in Russia seized. On RussiaTV5, a station whose owners are known to be close to Mr. Putin, Ms. Veselnitskaya was lauded as “one of those who gave the film crew the real proofs and records of testimony.”
Mr. Browder, who stopped the screening of the film in Europe by threatening libel suits, called the film a state-sponsored smear campaign.
“She’s not just some private lawyer,” Mr. Browder said of Ms. Veselnitskaya. “She is a tool of the Russian government.”
John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, testified in May that he had been concerned last year by Russian government efforts to contact and manipulate members of Mr. Trump’s campaign. “Russian intelligence agencies do not hesitate at all to use private companies and Russian persons who are unaffiliated with the Russian government to support their objectives,” he said.
The F.B.I. began a counterintelligence investigation [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/20/us/politics/fbi-investigation-trump-russia-comey.html ] last July into Russian contacts with any Trump associates. Agents focused on Mr. Manafort and a pair of advisers, Carter Page [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/19/us/politics/carter-page-russia-trump.html ] and Roger J. Stone.
Among those now under investigation is Michael T. Flynn, who was forced to resign as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser after it became known that he had falsely denied speaking to the Russian ambassador about sanctions imposed by the Obama administration over the election hacking.
Congress later discovered that Mr. Flynn had been paid more than $65,000 by companies linked to Russia, and that he had failed to disclose those payments when he renewed his security clearance and underwent an additional background check to join the White House staff.
In May, the president fired the F.B.I. director [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/us/politics/james-comey-fired-fbi.html ], James B. Comey, who days later provided information about a meeting with Mr. Trump at the White House. According to Mr. Comey, the president asked him to end the bureau’s investigation into Mr. Flynn; Mr. Trump has repeatedly denied making such a request. Robert S. Mueller III, a former F.B.I. director, was then appointed as special counsel [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/us/politics/robert-mueller-special-counsel-russia-investigation.html ].
The status of Mr. Mueller’s investigation is not clear, but he has assembled a veteran team of prosecutors and agents to dig into any possible collusion.
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© 2017 The New York Times Company
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html [with comments]
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Trump Jr. says he, Kushner and Manafort met with lawyer tied to Kremlin
Donald Trump Jr. says he, brother-in-law Jared Kushner and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort met with a Russian lawyer shortly after Donald Trump won the Republican nomination.
By Tom Hamburger and Rosalind S. Helderman
July 8, 2017
The president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., acknowledged attending a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer tied to the Kremlin, one of the first confirmed encounters between President Trump’s inner circle and a Russian national during the presidential campaign.
In a statement distributed Saturday evening, Trump Jr. confirmed he had participated in a “short introductory meeting,” which, per his request, was also attended by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and the chair of the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort.
“We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at that time and there was no follow-up,” Trump Jr. said in the statement. “I was asked to attend the meeting by an acquaintance, but was not told the name of the person I would be meeting with beforehand.”
The meeting was reported Saturday by the New York Times [just above, in full].
Kushner’s lawyer said in a statement that the president’s son-in-law had disclosed the session previously on his security clearance forms. But the new public report adds to the roster of curious private meetings between Trump allies and Russians during and after the campaign.
The meeting between the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and the president’s inner circle became public the day after President Trump met in Germany with Russian President Vladimir Putin for the first time. Trump questioned Putin about Russian meddling during the 2016 election; the Russian leader denied any such interference.
Veselnitskaya is well known to advocates of sanctions against Russia, particularly the Magnitsky Act [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/the-roots-of-the-hostility-between-putin-and-clinton/2016/07/28/85ca74ca-5402-11e6-b652-315ae5d4d4dd_story.html ], which prohibits U.S. interaction with Russians alleged to have committed human rights violations. Congress’s passage of the law in 2012 angered Putin and led him to retaliate by halting American adoptions of Russian children.
The adoption issue is frequently used as a talking point by opponents of the Magnitsky Act, said William Browder, an American financier who worked in Russia and lobbied for the sanctions, which are named after an auditor Browder employed, Sergei L. Magnitsky. Magnitsky died in a Russian prison under mysterious circumstances in 2009 after exposing a corruption scandal.
The act lists the names of individuals in Russia, including judges and other public officials, effectively blacklisting them from doing business in the United States.
“I can’t imagine that she brought up anything during the Trump Tower meeting other than the Magnitsky Act,” said Browder, who recalled Veselnitskaya defending her Russian clients against money-laundering allegations made by the U.S. government connected to a tax fraud that Magnitsky uncovered. The case was settled in May.
Veselnitskaya also had a major role in a public-relations campaign to repeal the Magnitsky Act that included a documentary film shown in Washington last year, Browder said.
Veselnitskaya did not return requests for comment from The Washington Post on Saturday.
Veselnitskaya told the New York Times that the participants in the meeting discussed the Magnitsky Act and the adoption issue. “Nothing at all was discussed about the presidential campaign,” she said, according to the Times. “I have never acted on behalf of the Russian government and have never discussed any of these matters with any representative of the Russian government.”
Manafort’s lawyer declined to comment on the Times report.
An attorney for Kushner, Jamie Gorelick, issued a statement emphasizing that the meeting had been disclosed earlier by Kushner.
“As we have previously stated, Mr. Kushner’s SF-86 was prematurely submitted and, among other errors, did not list any contacts with foreign government officials. The next day, Mr. Kushner submitted supplemental information stating that he had had ‘numerous contacts with foreign officials’ about which he would be happy to provide additional information,” the statement said. “ … Mr. Kushner has submitted additional updates and included, out of an abundance of caution, this meeting with a Russian person, which he briefly attended at the request of his brother-in-law, Donald Trump Jr. As Mr. Kushner has consistently stated, he is eager to cooperate and share what he knows.”
© 2017 The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-jr-says-he-kushner-and-manafort-met-with-lawyer-tied-to-kremlin/2017/07/08/18b86d36-6439-11e7-a4f7-af34fc1d9d39_story.html [with comments]
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Trump’s Son Met With Russian Lawyer After Being Promised Damaging Information on Clinton
Donald Trump Jr. in April. Mr. Trump, the president’s eldest son, arranged a meeting in June 2016 in New York with a Russian lawyer who has connections to the Kremlin.
Al Drago/The New York Times
By JO BECKER, MATT APUZZO and ADAM GOLDMAN
JULY 9, 2017
President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton [ http://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/hillary-rodham-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.
The meeting was also attended by his campaign chairman at the time, Paul J. Manafort, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kushner recently disclosed the meeting, though not its content, in confidential government documents described to The New York Times.
The Times reported the existence of the meeting [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html (in full, second above)] on Saturday. But in subsequent interviews, the advisers and others revealed the motivation behind it.
The meeting — at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, two weeks after Donald J. Trump [ http://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/donald-trump ] clinched the Republican nomination [ https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/us/politics/donald-trump-republican-nomination.html ] — 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.
While President Trump has been dogged by revelations of undisclosed meetings between his associates and the Russians, the episode at Trump Tower is the first such confirmed private meeting involving his inner circle during the campaign — as well as the first one known to have included his eldest son. It came at an inflection point in the campaign, when Donald Trump Jr., who served as an adviser and a surrogate, was ascendant and Mr. Manafort was consolidating power.
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.
When he was first asked about the meeting on Saturday, Donald Trump Jr. said that it was primarily about adoptions and mentioned nothing about Mrs. Clinton.
President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, also attended the meeting last year at Trump Tower.
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
But on Sunday, presented with The Times’s findings, he offered a new account. In a statement, he said he had met with the Russian lawyer at the request of an acquaintance from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, which his father took to Moscow. “After pleasantries were exchanged,” he said, “the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Mrs. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”
He said she then turned the conversation to adoption of Russian children and the Magnitsky Act, an American law that blacklists suspected Russian human rights abusers. The 2012 law so enraged President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that he halted American adoptions of Russian children.
“It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting,” Mr. Trump said.
Two people briefed on the meeting said the intermediary was Rob Goldstone, a former British tabloid journalist and the president of a company called Oui 2 Entertainment who has worked with the Miss Universe pageant. He did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the president’s lawyer, said on Sunday that “the president was not aware of and did not attend the meeting.”
Lawyers for Mr. Kushner referred to their statement a day earlier, confirming that he voluntarily disclosed the meeting but referring questions about it to Donald Trump Jr. Mr. Manafort declined to comment. In his statement, Donald Trump Jr. said he asked Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kushner to attend, but did not tell them what the meeting was about.
Political campaigns collect opposition research from many quarters but rarely from sources linked to foreign governments.
American intelligence agencies have concluded [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/us/politics/russia-hack-report.html ] that Russian hackers and propagandists worked to tip the election toward Donald J. Trump, in part by stealing and then providing to WikiLeaks internal Democratic Party and Clinton campaign emails that were embarrassing to Mrs. Clinton. WikiLeaks began releasing the material on July 22.
Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul J. Manafort, at the Republican National Convention in July 2016 in Cleveland.
Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
A special prosecutor and congressional committees are now investigating the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with the Russians. Mr. Trump has disputed that, but the investigation has cast a shadow over his administration.
Mr. Trump has also equivocated on whether the Russians were solely responsible for the hacking. On Sunday, two days after his first meeting as president with Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump said in a Twitter post [ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/884012097805406208 ]: “I strongly pressed President Putin twice about Russian meddling in our election. He vehemently denied it. I’ve already given my opinion......”
On Sunday morning on Fox News, the White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, described the Trump Tower meeting as a “big nothing burger.”
“Talking about issues of foreign policy, issues related to our place in the world, issues important to the American people is not unusual,” he said.
But Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the leading Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, one of the panels investigating Russian election interference, said he wanted to question “everyone that was at that meeting.”
“There’s no reason for this Russian government advocate to be meeting with Paul Manafort or with Mr. Kushner or the president’s son if it wasn’t about the campaign and Russia policy,” Mr. Schiff said after the initial Times report.
Ms. Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer invited to the Trump Tower meeting, is best known for mounting a multipronged attack against the Magnitsky Act.
The adoption impasse is a frequently used talking point for opponents of the act. Ms. Veselnitskaya’s campaign against the law has also included attempts to discredit the man after whom it was named, Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer and auditor who died in 2009 in mysterious circumstances in a Russian prison after exposing one of the biggest corruption scandals during Mr. Putin’s rule.
Ms. Veselnitskaya’s clients include state-owned businesses and a senior government official’s son, whose company was under investigation in the United States at the time of the meeting. Her activities and associations had previously drawn the attention of the F.B.I., according to a former senior law enforcement official.
Ms. Veselnitskaya said in a statement on Saturday that “nothing at all about the presidential campaign” was discussed at the Trump Tower meeting. She recalled that after about 10 minutes, either Mr. Kushner or Mr. Manafort left the room.
She said she had “never acted on behalf of the Russian government” and “never discussed any of these matters with any representative of the Russian government.”
The Trump Tower meeting was disclosed to government officials in recent weeks, when Mr. Kushner, who is also a senior White House aide, filed a revised version of a confidential form required to obtain a security clearance.
The Times reported in April [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/us/politics/jared-kushner-russians-security-clearance.html ] that he had not disclosed any foreign contacts, including meetings with the Russian ambassador to the United States and the head of a Russian state bank. Failure to report such contacts can result in a loss of access to classified information and even, if information is knowingly falsified or concealed, in imprisonment.
Mr. Kushner’s advisers said at the time that the omissions were an error, and that he had immediately notified the F.B.I. that he would be revising the filing.
Mr. Manafort, the former campaign chairman, also recently disclosed the meeting, and Donald Trump Jr.’s role in organizing it, to congressional investigators who had questions about his foreign contacts, according to people familiar with the events. Neither Mr. Manafort nor Mr. Kushner was required to disclose the content of the meeting.
Since the president took office, Donald Trump Jr. and his brother Eric have assumed day-to-day control of their father’s real estate empire. Because he does not serve in the administration and does not have a security clearance, Donald Trump Jr. was not required to disclose his foreign contacts. Federal and congressional investigators have not publicly asked for any records that would require his disclosure of Russian contacts.
But in an interview with The Times in March, he denied participating in any campaign-related meetings with Russian nationals. “Did I meet with people that were Russian? I’m sure, I’m sure I did,” he said. “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.”
In addition to her campaign against the Magnitsky Act, Ms. Veselnitskaya represents powerful players in Russia. Among her clients is Denis Katsyv, the Russian owner of Prevezon Holdings, an investment company based in Cyprus. He is the son of Petr Katsyv, the vice president of the state-owned Russian Railways and a former deputy governor of the Moscow region. In a civil forfeiture case in New York, the Justice Department alleged that Prevezon had helped launder money linked to the $230 million corruption scheme exposed by Mr. Magnitsky by putting it in real estate and bank accounts. Prevezon recently settled the case for $6 million without admitting wrongdoing.
Ms. Veselnitskaya and her client also hired a team of political and legal operatives in the United States. The team included Rinat Akhmetshin, an émigré to the United States who once served as a Soviet military officer and who has been called a Russian political gun for hire. Fusion GPS, a consulting firm that produced an intelligence dossier that contained unverified allegations about Mr. Trump, was also hired to do research for Prevezon.
The F.B.I. began a counterintelligence investigation [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/20/us/politics/fbi-investigation-trump-russia-comey.html ] last year into Russian contacts with any Trump associates. Agents focused on Mr. Manafort and a pair of advisers, Carter Page and Roger J. Stone Jr.
Among those now under investigation is Michael T. Flynn, who was forced to resign [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/13/us/politics/donald-trump-national-security-adviser-michael-flynn.html ] as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser after it became known that he had falsely denied speaking to the Russian ambassador about sanctions imposed by the Obama administration over the election hacking.
Congress later learned that Mr. Flynn had been paid more than $65,000 by companies linked to Russia, and that he had failed to disclose those payments when he renewed his security clearance and underwent an additional background check to join the White House staff.
In May, the president fired the F.B.I. director [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/us/politics/james-comey-fired-fbi.html ], James B. Comey, who days later provided information about a meeting with Mr. Trump at the White House. According to Mr. Comey, the president asked him to end the bureau’s investigation into Mr. Flynn; Mr. Trump has repeatedly denied making such a request. Robert S. Mueller III, a former F.B.I. director, was then appointed as special counsel [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/us/politics/robert-mueller-special-counsel-russia-investigation.html ].
The status of Mr. Mueller’s investigation is not clear, but he has assembled a veteran team of prosecutors and agents to dig into any possible collusion.
Related Coverage
Trump Team Met With Lawyer Linked to Kremlin During Campaign
JULY 8, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html
Donald Trump Jr.’s Two Different Explanations for Russian Meeting
JULY 9, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/09/us/donald-trump-jrs-two-different-explanations-for-russian-meeting.html
© 2017 The New York Times Company
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/09/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html [with comments]
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The Truth Behind Donald Trump, Jr.’s Meeting with a Russian Lawyer
The question of collusion with Russia is hardly the closed matter that President Trump has proposed it to be.
Photograph by Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty
By David Remnick
July 9, 2017
Don’t get ahead of the reporting. That’s one of the first lessons you’re supposed to learn as a novitiate in the church of journalism. Don’t assert what is not yet established by the facts. The consequences can be dire. In the rare case when Woodward and Bernstein stumbled during their Watergate reporting, it was because at one point they got a little ahead of their carefully established web of facts when it came to who was running the conspiracy. In the end, they were right, but the stumble allowed the Nixon Administration to charge, in modern parlance, #fakenews. “Shabby journalism” is what Ron Ziegler, the Sean Spicer of the Nixon era, called it.
The Trump Administration should not win any moral or political plaudits even if it turns out, in the end, that there was no collusion between the President’s campaign and the Russian government. Its countless sins of lying, conflict of interest, shady business transactions, character assassination, and so much else assures it a place in history as a uniquely grimy Administration. And we are not yet a half year into its reign.
So, unless we are grading on a curve that even the most forgiving god would discount, innocence in the matter of collusion does not bring the Trump Administration nearer to the gates of heaven. But the issue is hardly the closed matter that Trump would propose it to be. Thanks to new reporting from the Times [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/09/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html (in full just above)], we are starting to see evidence that fits the theory. Within two days of the President’s dispiritingly weak and erratic performance in Hamburg––his winsome meeting with Vladimir Putin, the disheartening spectacle of the Europeans treating the United States with suspicion on issues ranging from global security to the fate of the global environment––we learn that Trump associates, including the President’s son, met during the 2016 campaign with one Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Kremlin-connected lawyer, on the promise that she could provide them information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
The meeting took place on June 9, 2016, at Trump Tower. Trump’s emissaries included Donald Trump, Jr., who now helps to run the family businesses; Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who now helps to run the country; and his then campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who has a long history of business ties to Russia and pro-Russia Ukrainians, as well as a variety of political kleptocrats including Jonas Savimbi, Mobuto Sese Seko, and Ferdinand Marcos. The Trump team said there was nothing untoward about the meeting
“After pleasantries were exchanged,” Trump, Jr., told the Times, “the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.” Trump, Jr., went on to claim that the discussion was largely about the Russian ban on foreign adoptions. Reince Priebus, the President’s chief of staff, described the meeting on “Fox News Sunday” as a “big nothing burger.” For her part, Veselnitsyaka said that the meeting did not concern the campaign at all and that Manafort and Kushner left the room after ten minutes.
This follows the Wall Street Journal’s story [ https://www.wsj.com/articles/gop-operative-sought-clinton-emails-from-hackers-implied-a-connection-to-flynn-1498770851 ] last week that investigators have reviewed reports from intelligence agencies on Russian hackers discussing how to hack Clinton’s e-mails and get the material to Michael Flynn, the former N.S.A. chief, via an intermediary, and that Peter Smith, a longtime Republican operative, had undertaken an effort to obtain the Clinton e-mails and suggested to those around him that he was working with Flynn. The excuse the Trump Administration had for that one was that Smith “didn’t work for the campaign” and that if Flynn was working with him “in any way, it would have been in his capacity as a private individual.”
There has also been a great deal of solid journalism committed by Adam Davidson [ http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/donald-trumps-worst-deal ], of The New Yorker, Timothy O’Brien, of Bloomberg, and others on Trump’s business history and his links to disreputables in Russia and the former Soviet Union. All this begins to add up to an unlovely portrait of the President and his associates. In addition, the F.B.I. and congressional investigators are sorting through what, if any, relationship there might have been between the hundreds of Internet trolls who pumped out false, undermining stories about Clinton, Russian sponsors, and the Trump campaign. It is unlikely that the full story of the role of WikiLeaks in this saga has been told yet, either.
On his European trip, Trump has kept up his antic strategy of deflection and diversion, and, at the same time, he insists on demeaning his own intelligence services––on foreign soil, no less. To the embarrassment of an ungrateful nation, he tweeted that “everyone here is talking about why John Podesta refused to give the DNC server to the FBI and the CIA. Disgraceful!” Where to begin? No one in Europe was talking about John Podesta, who did not have control of the D.N.C. server and who has coöperated fully with investigators.
Trump went on to say from one lectern at the summit, “I remember when I was sitting back listening about Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, how everybody was a hundred per cent certain that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. Guess what? That led to one big mess. They were wrong, and it led to a mess.”
This is true up to a point, but is it applicable? What happened in 2003 is that the Bush Administration, led by Dick Cheney, pressured intelligence officials to provide the answer that it desired on weapons of mass destruction in order to invade Iraq; analysts themselves were hardly unanimous on the question of W.M.D. In this case, the intelligence agencies have repeatedly declared their confidence that Russian hackers tried to undermine the American election and that they did so at the direction of Vladimir Putin––the same person Trump declared in Hamburg he was “honored” to meet. We should see more of their evidence, where possible, but the analogy to the case of the Iraq deception is a thin reed.
So, yes, it is wrong to get ahead of the reporting. But the myriad implications of a hacked Presidential election, while too much to bear for the President—his ego seems to implode at any suggestion that his victory was possibly more complicated than the unambiguous “landslide” he imagines it to be—demands the answers that journalists, law enforcement, and Congress are pursuing. Part of that process is admitting error, as CNN did, quickly and responsibly recently after an errant story. Part of that process is having the patience to see what the truth, as it emerges over time, turns out to be. For now, we live in a moment when the President of the United States is, without shame, trying to intimidate the people whose business it is to come to an honest reckoning. He tries to intimidate the press. He has fired an F.B.I. director and considered going further. It’s reasonable to wonder why. Without assuming too much, too soon.
© 2017 Condé Nast
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-truth-behind-donald-trump-jrs-meeting-with-a-russian-lawyer
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Kellyanne Conway full 'New Day' interview
Published on Jul 10, 2017 by CNN [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCupvZG-5ko_eiXAupbDfxWw / https://www.youtube.com/user/CNN , https://www.youtube.com/user/CNN/videos ]
Counselor to President Trump Kellyanne Conway talks with CNN's Chris Cuomo about Trump and the Russia investigation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6UDVmtNt4E [with (nearly 4,000) comments]
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If There Was No Collusion, It Wasn’t for Lack of Trying
Donald Trump Jr. boards an elevator at Trump Tower.
Donald Trump Jr. made clear he was willing to receive damaging information about Hillary Clinton from a Russian lawyer in a June 2016 meeting.
Jul 10, 2017
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/if-there-wasnt-collusion-it-wasnt-for-lack-of-trying/533070/ [with comments]
Donald Trump Jr. just contradicted a whole bunch of White House denials of Russian contacts
1) Trump Jr. on Saturday: The meeting was about Russian adoption
2) Trump Jr. in March: No meetings “representing the campaign” with Russians
3) President-elect Trump in January: No contact between Trump associates and Russia during campaign
4) Hope Hicks: "No communication" with a foreign entity
5) Kellyanne Conway in December: “Absolutely not” on contact with Russians trying to meddle
6) Vice President Pence in January: “Of course not”
7) Spicer in February: Doesn't change Trump's January statement
8) Trump Jr. in July 2016: Suggestions that Russians tried to help Trump are “lies”
July 10, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/10/donald-trump-jr-just-contradicted-a-whole-bunch-of-white-house-denials-of-russian-contacts/ [with embedded video, and comments]
Meeting between Trump Jr. and Russian lawyer was requested by Russian pop star whose family is close to Putin
Donald Trump Jr. talks to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House in April 2017.
July 10, 2017
A meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer was set up at the request of Emin Agalarov, a Russian pop star whose Kremlin-connected family has done business with President Trump in the past, according to the person who arranged the meeting.
Rob Goldstone, a music publicist who represents Agalarov, confirmed on Monday that he requested the Trump Tower meeting at Agalarov’s request. Emin Agalarov and his father, Aras Agalarov, a wealthy Moscow real estate developer, helped sponsor the Trump-owned Miss Universe pageant in Russia in 2013.
After the pageant, the Agalarovs signed a preliminary deal with Trump to build a tower bearing his name in Moscow, though the deal has been on hold since Trump began running for president.
Goldstone had previously told The Washington Post that he set up and attended the meeting for the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, so that she could discuss the adoption of Russian children by Americans.
The revelations about the meeting come as federal prosecutors and congressional investigators explore whether the Trump campaign coordinated and encouraged Russian efforts to intervene in the election to hurt Clinton and elect Donald Trump.
In a new statement, Goldstone confirmed what Trump Jr. himself revealed Sunday: That he enticed the then-Republican candidate’s son by indicating that Veselnitskaya could provide damaging information about Democrats.
“The lawyer had apparently stated she had some information regarding illegal campaign contributions to the DNC which she believed Mr. Trump Jr. might find important,” he said.
At the meeting, which also included Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and a top campaign aide, Paul Manafort, the Russian lawyer offered “a few very general remarks” about campaign funding, Goldstone said.
She then proceeded to discuss the Magnitsky Act, a 2012 U.S. law that imposed sanctions on Russia for its alleged human rights abuses. Angered over the law, Russia retaliated by halting U.S. adoptions of Russian children.
Trump Jr. has said his father was unaware of the meeting, and both he and Goldstone said there was no additional follow-up beyond the brief June 2016 session.
The involvement of the Agalarovs brings the meeting closer to both Trump’s past business interests and to the Kremlin. Trump has spent time with both Emin Agalarov and his father, Aras — appearing in a music video for the Russian musician, which was filmed at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton Hotel in 2013.
Meanwhile, the Agalarovs are also close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Aras Agalarov’s company has been awarded several large state building contracts, and shortly after the pageant, Putin awarded the elder Agalarov the “Order of Honor of the Russian Federation,” a prestigious designation.
Emin Agalarov told The Post last year that he had spoken with Trump numerous times about the need to build stronger ties between Russia and the United States.
“He kept saying, ‘Every time there is friction between United States and Russia, it’s bad for both countries. For the people to benefit, this should be fixed. We should be friends,’ ” Emin Agalarov told The Post last year about his conversations with Trump.
A spokesman for the Agalarovs did not respond to request for comment, nor did a spokeswoman for Trump Jr.
On Monday, the Kremlin said it was unaware of a the meeting between Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer purported to have information that could potentially damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Asked about the meeting Monday, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters that the Kremlin does not know the lawyer, and added that the Kremlin “cannot keep track of every Russian lawyer and their meetings domestically or abroad.”
Peskov, asked about Veselnitskaya by reporters on a conference call, said, “We do not know who that is.”
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/kremlin-denies-knowing-of-donald-trump-jr-meeting-with-russian-lawyer-during-2016-campaign/2017/07/10/c2bfee34-6566-11e7-a1d7-9a32c91c6f40_story.html [with comments]
Why in the world would Donald Trump Jr. take this meeting?
Donald Trump Jr. delivers a speech during a ceremony for the official opening of the Trump International Tower and Hotel on Feb. 28 in Vancouver, Canada.
By Ruth Marcus
July 10, 2017
Imagine that you are Donald Trump Jr. Your father has just clinched the Republican nomination for president. An acquaintance, someone you know from the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, calls asking to set up a meeting [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/kremlin-denies-knowing-of-donald-trump-jr-meeting-with-russian-lawyer-during-2016-campaign/2017/07/10/c2bfee34-6566-11e7-a1d7-9a32c91c6f40_story.html ] with a Russian who, he says, has information helpful to the campaign — i.e., dirt on Hillary Clinton. Do you:
a) Worry that this doesn’t sound completely kosher and ask for a bit more information — for example, who is this person?
b) Worry that this doesn’t sound completely kosher and call the campaign lawyer to figure out how to proceed?
c) Invite the unknown Russian to come to Trump Tower and ask campaign chairman Paul Manafort and your brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, to sit in?
The right answers, for anyone who has been around politics and political campaigns, are a) or b). Trump Jr.’s answer, we now know [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html (in full above), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/09/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html (in full above)] — after his first, incredible-on-its-face explanation that in the midst of a presidential campaign the top brass paused for a meeting “primarily” about adoption of Russian children — was c): Come on down!
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2017/07/10/why-in-the-world-would-donald-trump-jr-take-this-meeting/ [with comments]
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Donald Trump Jr. Lawyers Up
The president’s son joins a grand White House tradition.
July 10, 2017
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/donald-trump-jr-lawyers-up
Donald Trump Jr. Has Hired A Lawyer Who Has Handled Organized Crime And Cybercrime Cases
Donald Trump Jr. has hired New York criminal defense lawyer Alan Futerfas, as the president’s son faces scrutiny for his meeting last year with a Russian lawyer.
July 10, 2017
https://www.buzzfeed.com/zoetillman/donald-trump-jr-has-hired-a-lawyer-who-has-handled [with comments]
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Trump Jr. Was Told in Email of Russian [Government] Effort to Aid Campaign
Donald Trump Jr. spoke at a rally in May in Bozeman, Montana.
William Campbell/Corbis, via Getty Images
By MATT APUZZO, JO BECKER, ADAM GOLDMAN and MAGGIE HABERMAN
JULY 10, 2017
WASHINGTON — Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email.
The email to the younger Mr. Trump was sent by Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid reporter who helped broker the June 2016 meeting. In a statement on Sunday, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he was interested in receiving damaging information about Mrs. Clinton, but gave no indication that he thought the lawyer might have been a Kremlin proxy.
Mr. Goldstone’s message, as described to The New York Times by the three people, indicates that the Russian government was the source of the potentially damaging information. It does not elaborate on the wider effort by Moscow to help the Trump campaign. There is no evidence to suggest that the promised damaging information was related to Russian government computer hacking that led to the release of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails.
But the email is likely to be of keen interest to the Justice Department and congressional investigators, who are examining whether any of President Trump’s associates colluded with the Russian government to disrupt last year’s election. American intelligence agencies have determined that the Russian government tried to sway the election in favor of Mr. Trump.
The Times first reported on the existence of the meeting on Saturday, and a fuller picture has emerged in subsequent days.
Alan Futerfas, the lawyer for the younger Mr. Trump, said his client had done nothing wrong but pledged to work with investigators if contacted.
“In my view, this is much ado about nothing. During this busy period, Robert Goldstone contacted Don Jr. in an email and suggested that people had information concerning alleged wrongdoing by Democratic Party front-runner, Hillary Clinton, in her dealings with Russia,” he told The Times in an email on Monday. “Don Jr.’s takeaway from this communication was that someone had information potentially helpful to the campaign and it was coming from someone he knew. Don Jr. had no knowledge as to what specific information, if any, would be discussed.”
It is unclear whether Mr. Goldstone had direct knowledge of the origin of the damaging material. One person who was briefed on the emails said it appeared that he was passing along information that had been passed through several others.
Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, and Paul J. Manafort, the campaign chairman at the time, also attended the June 2016 meeting in New York. Representatives for Mr. Kushner referred requests for comments back to an earlier statement, which said he had voluntarily disclosed the meeting to the federal government. He has deferred questions on the content of the meeting to Donald Trump Jr.
A spokesman for Mr. Manafort declined to comment.
But at the White House, the deputy press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was adamant from the briefing room lectern that “the president’s campaign did not collude in any way. Don Jr. did not collude with anybody to influence the election. No one within the Trump campaign colluded in order to influence the election.”
The president, a prolific Twitter user, did not address his son’s controversy on Monday, and instead sought to highlight other issues throughout the morning.
In a series of tweets, the president’s son insisted he had done what anyone connected to a political campaign would have done — hear out potentially damaging information about an opponent. He maintained that his various statements about the meeting were not in conflict.
“Obviously I’m the first person on a campaign to ever take a meeting to hear info about an opponent... went nowhere but had to listen,” he wrote in one tweet. In another, he added, “No inconsistency in statements, meeting ended up being primarily about adoptions. In response to further Q’s I simply provided more details.”
The younger Mr. Trump, who had a reputation during the campaign for having meetings with a wide range of people eager to speak to him, did not join his father’s administration. He runs the family business, the Trump Organization, with his brother Eric.
On Monday, after news reports that he had hired a lawyer, he indicated in a tweet that he would be open to speaking to the Senate Intelligence Committee, one of the congressional panels investigating Russian meddling in the election. “Happy to work with the committee to pass on what I know,” the younger Mr. Trump wrote.
Mr. Goldstone represents the Russian pop star Emin Agalarov, whose father was President Trump’s business partner in bringing the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in 2013. In an interview Monday, Mr. Goldstone said he was asked by Mr. Agalarov to set up the meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya.
“He said, ‘I’m told she has information about illegal campaign contributions to the D.N.C.,’” Mr. Goldstone recalled, referring to the Democratic National Committee. He said he then emailed Donald Trump Jr., outlining what the lawyer purported to have.
But Mr. Goldstone, who wrote the email over a year ago, denied any knowledge of involvement by the Russian government in the matter, saying that never dawned on him. “Never, never ever,” he said. Later, after the email was described to The Times, efforts to reach him for further comment were unsuccessful.
In the interview, he said it was his understanding that Ms. Veselnitskaya was simply a “private citizen” for whom Mr. Agalarov wanted to do a favor. He also said he did not know whether Mr. Agalarov’s father, Aras Agalarov, a Moscow real estate tycoon known to be close to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, was involved. The elder Mr. Agalarov and the younger Mr. Trump worked together to bring a Trump Tower to Moscow, but the project never got off the ground.
Emin Agalarov, right, spoke alongside Donald J. Trump and Erin Brady, Miss USA, in Las Vegas in 2013.
Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Mr. Goldstone also said his recollection of the meeting largely tracked with the account given by the president’s son, as outlined in the Sunday statement Mr. Trump issued in response to a Times article [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/09/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html (in full above)] on the June 2016 meeting. Mr. Goldstone said the last time he had communicated with the younger Mr. Trump was to send him a congratulatory text after the November election, but he added that he did speak to the Trump Organization over the past weekend, before giving his account to the news media.
Donald Trump Jr., who initially told The Times that Ms. Veselnitskaya wanted to talk about the resumption of adoption of Russian children by American families, acknowledged in the Sunday statement that one subject of the meeting was possibly compromising information about Mrs. Clinton. His decision to move ahead with such a meeting was unusual for a political campaign, but it was consistent with the haphazard approach the Trump operation, and the White House, have taken in vetting people they deal with ahead of time.
But he said that the Russian lawyer produced nothing of consequence, and that the meeting ended after she began talking about the Magnitsky Act — an American law that blacklists Russians suspected of human rights abuses. The 2012 law so enraged Mr. Putin that he halted American adoptions of Russian children.
Mr. Goldstone said Ms. Veselnitskaya offered “just a vague, generic statement about the campaign’s funding and how people, including Russian people, living all over the world donate when they shouldn’t donate” before turning to her anti-Magnitsky Act arguments.
“It was the most inane nonsense I’ve ever heard,” he said. “And I was actually feeling agitated by it. Had I, you know, actually taken up what is a huge amount of their busy time with this nonsense?”
Ms. Veselnitskaya, for her part, denied that the campaign or compromising material about Mrs. Clinton ever came up. She said she had never acted on behalf of the Russian government. A spokesperson for Mr. Putin said on Monday that he did not know Ms. Veselnitskaya, and that he had no knowledge of the June 2016 meeting.
Ms. Sanders said at a news briefing that the American president had learned of the meeting recently, but she declined to discuss details.
The White House press office, however, accused Mrs. Clinton’s team of hypocrisy. The office circulated a January 2017 article published in Politico, detailing how officials from the Ukranian government tried to help the Democratic candidate conduct opposition research on Mr. Trump and some of his aides.
News of the meeting involving the younger Mr. Trump, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Manafort blunted whatever good feeling the president’s team had after his trip to Europe for the Group of 20 economic summit meeting.
The president learned from his aides about the 2016 meeting at the end of the trip, according to a White House official. But some people in the White House had known for several days that it had occurred, because Mr. Kushner had revised his foreign contact disclosure document to include it.
The president was frustrated by the news of the meeting, according to a person close to him — less over the fact that it had happened, and more because it was yet another story about Russia that had swamped the news cycle.
Related Coverage
When the Kremlin Says ‘Adoptions,’ It Means ‘Sanctions’
JULY 10, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/world/americas/kremlin-adoptions-sanctions-russia.html
How a Pageant Led to a Trump Son’s Meeting With a Russian Lawyer
Rob Goldstone, a former British tabloid journalist and the president of a marketing company called Oui 2 Entertainment who has worked with the Miss Universe pageant, requested that Donald J. Trump Jr. meet with the lawyer connected to the Kremlin.
JULY 10, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/us/politics/rob-goldstone-russia-trump.html
© 2017 The New York Times Company
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/us/politics/donald-trump-jr-russia-email-candidacy.html [with comments]
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Jim Dalrymple II
@JimDalrympleII
Full statement Donald Trump Jr's attorney sent to BuzzFeed News in response to tonight’s NYT story on Jr’s meeting/email
10:27 PM - 10 Jul 2017
https://twitter.com/JimDalrympleII/status/884599915980013568 [with comments]
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The Stories On Don Jr.’s Russia Meeting Were A "Bat Signal" For Trump’s Base
The MAGA crowd fiercely defended the eldest Trump son in a way they haven’t for other members of Trump’s inner circle, including Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.
July 10, 2017
https://www.buzzfeed.com/tariniparti/the-stories-on-don-jrs-russia-meeting-were-a-bat-signal-for [with comments]
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Sebastian Gorka on Trump Jr. Controversy: 'Massive Nothing Burger'
MSNBC Live with Stephanie Ruhle
7/11/17
Sebastian Gorka, Deputy Assistant to President Trump, told MNSBC's Stephanie Ruhle that the controversy surrounding Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Russian attorney is a "massive nothing burger." Duration: 15:51
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-news/watch/sebastian-gorka-on-trump-jr-controversy-massive-nothing-burger-992659523584 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gYELqoNOMY [with comments] [and again, see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=129013931 and preceding and following]
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HEATED: CNN Alisyn Battles Sebastian Gorka over 'Fake News' Trump - Russia Collusion on New Day 7/11/2017
Published on Jul 11, 2017 by Live Stream TV News [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxoADTw18wjYQKGHiV2ea-Q , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxoADTw18wjYQKGHiV2ea-Q/videos ]
[unofficial upload for the moment at least at] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yMoQWY4SSw [with comments] [no official upload (yet) available at https://www.youtube.com/user/CNN/videos ] [and again, see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=129013931 and preceding and following]
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Donald Trump Jr.
@DonaldJTrumpJr
Here's my statement and the full email chain
11:00 AM - 11 Jul 2017
https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/884789418455953413 [with (over 7,000) comments] [posted by Trump Jr. knowing the NYT article next below was about to be published, as it was just minutes later]
Donald Trump Jr.
@DonaldJTrumpJr
Here is page 4 (which did not post due to space constraints).
11:01 AM - 11 Jul 2017
https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/884789839522140166 [with (over 9,000) comments] [posted by Trump Jr. knowing the NYT article next below was about to be published, as it was just minutes later]
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Russian Dirt on Clinton? ‘I Love It,’ Donald Trump Jr. Said
Video [embedded]:
Follow Donald Trump Jr.'s Russia Email Trail
Donald Trump Jr. received an email on June 3, 2016, promising dirt on Hillary Clinton. The information was described as being part of Russia's support for his father’s presidential bid. His reply? “I love it.”
By Drew Jordan on Publish Date July 11, 2017.
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000005250366/donald-trump-jr-russia-emails.html [no official YouTube (yet) available at https://www.youtube.com/user/TheNewYorkTimes/videos ]
Document:
Read the Emails on Donald Trump Jr.’s Russia Meeting
The text of email correspondence setting up a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Kremlin-connected lawyer in chronological order.
JULY 11, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/11/us/politics/donald-trump-jr-email-text.html
Graphic:
How Key Trump Associates Have Been Linked to Russia
Several are under scrutiny by the F.B.I. and Congress.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/07/us/politics/trump-russia-flynn-kushner.html
By JO BECKER, ADAM GOLDMAN and MATT APUZZO
JULY 11, 2017
The June 3, 2016, email sent to Donald Trump Jr. could hardly have been more explicit: One of his father’s former Russian business partners had been contacted by a senior Russian government official and was offering to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Hillary Clinton [ http://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/hillary-rodham-clinton ].
The documents “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” read the email, written by a trusted intermediary, who added, “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
If the future president’s eldest son was surprised or disturbed by the provenance of the promised material — or the notion that it was part of a continuing effort by the Russian government to aid his father’s campaign — he gave no indication.
He replied within minutes: “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”
Four days later, after a flurry of emails, the intermediary wrote back, proposing a meeting in New York on Thursday with a “Russian government attorney.”
Donald Trump Jr. agreed, adding that he would most likely bring along “Paul Manafort (campaign boss)” and “my brother-in-law,” Jared Kushner, now one of the president’s closest White House advisers.
On June 9, the Russian lawyer was sitting in the younger Mr. Trump’s office on the 25th floor of Trump Tower, just one level below the office of the future president.
Over the past several days, The New York Times has disclosed the existence of the meeting [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html (in full above)], whom it involved and what it was about. The story has unfolded as The Times has been able to confirm details of the meetings.
But the email exchanges, which were reviewed by The Times, offer a detailed unspooling of how the meeting with the Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, came about — and just how eager Donald Trump Jr. was to accept what he was explicitly told was the Russian government’s help.
The Justice Department and the House and Senate Intelligence Committees are examining whether any of President Trump’s associates colluded with the Russian government to disrupt last year’s election. American intelligence agencies have determined that the Russian government tried to sway the election in favor of Mr. Trump.
The precise nature of the promised damaging information about Mrs. Clinton is unclear, and there is no evidence to suggest that it was related to Russian-government computer hacking that led to the release of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails [ https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/us/politics/dnc-wikileaks-emails-fundraising.html ]. But in recent days, accounts by some of the central organizers of the meeting, including Donald Trump Jr., have evolved or have been contradicted by the written email records.
After being told that The Times was about to publish the content of the emails, instead of responding to a request for comment, Donald Trump Jr. posted images of them on Tuesday on Twitter [just above].
“To everyone, in order to be totally transparent, I am releasing the entire email chain of my emails” about the June 9 meeting, he wrote. “I first wanted to just have a phone call but when that didn’t work out, they said the woman would be in New York and asked if I would meet.”
He added that nothing came of it. But in an interview on Tuesday with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, he said that “in retrospect, I probably would have done things a little differently.”
At a White House briefing earlier Tuesday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy press secretary, referred questions about the meeting to Donald Trump Jr.’s counsel, but read a statement from the president in which he called his son “a high-quality person.”
The back story to the June 9 meeting involves an eclectic cast of characters the Trump family knew from its business dealings in Moscow.
The initial email outreach came from Rob Goldstone [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/us/politics/rob-goldstone-russia-trump.html ], a British-born former tabloid reporter and entertainment publicist who first met the future president when the Trump Organization was trying to do business in Russia.
In the June 3 email, Mr. Goldstone told Donald Trump Jr. that he was writing on behalf of a mutual friend, one of Russia’s biggest pop music stars, Emin Agalarov. Emin, who professionally uses his first name only, is the son of Aras Agalarov, a real estate tycoon sometimes called the “Donald Trump of Russia.”
The elder Mr. Agalarov boasts close ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia: His company has won several large state building contracts, and Mr. Putin awarded him the Order of Honor of the Russian Federation.
Rob Goldstone’s facebook page shows he checked in to Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, “preparing for meeting.”
Mr. Agalarov joined with the elder Mr. Trump to bring the Miss Universe contest [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/us/politics/how-trumps-miss-universe-in-russia-became-ensnared-in-a-political-inquiry.html ] to Moscow in 2013, and the Trump and Agalarov families grew relatively close.
When Emin released a music video with a theme borrowed from the television show “The Apprentice,” Mr. Trump, then the show’s star, made a cameo appearance, delivering his trademark line: “You’re fired!” The elder Mr. Agalarov had also partnered with the Trumps to build a Trump hotel in Moscow, but the deal never came to fruition.
“Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting,” Mr. Goldstone wrote in the email. “The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.”
He added, “What do you think is the best way to handle this information and would you be able to speak to Emin about it directly?”
There is no such title as crown prosecutor in Russia — the Crown Prosecution Service is a British term — but the equivalent in Russia is the prosecutor general of Russia.
That office is held by Yury Yakovlevich Chaika, a Putin appointee who is known to be close to Ms. Veselnitskaya.
Arranging a Meeting
After sending back his reply of “I love it especially later in the summer” — when voters’ attention would be heightened by the approaching election — Donald Trump Jr. arranged to speak with Emin, sending along his private cellphone number on June 6.
“Ok he’s on stage in Moscow but should be off within 20 Minutes so I’m sure can call,” Mr. Goldstone wrote at 3:43 p.m.
Within the hour, Donald Trump Jr. had responded: “Rob thanks for the help. D.”
The next day, Mr. Goldstone followed up: “Don Hope all is well Emin asked that I schedule a meeting with you and The Russian government attorney who is flying over from Moscow for this Thursday. I believe you are aware of this meeting — and so wondered if 3pm or later on Thursday works for you?”
Mr. Goldstone’s emails contradict statements he made in his interview with The Times on Monday, when he said that he did not know whether the elder Mr. Agalarov had any role in arranging the meeting, and that he had no knowledge of any official Russian government role in the offer to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Mrs. Clinton. Instead, he said that Ms. Veselnitskaya had contacted Emin directly, and that Emin had asked him to reach out to the Trumps as a favor to her.
“I actually asked him at one point how he knew her, and he said, ‘I can’t remember but, you know, I know thousands of people,’” he said in the interview.
Subsequent efforts to reach Mr. Goldstone, who acknowledged in the interview that he had spoken with someone at the Trump Organization over the weekend in anticipation of news media attention, have been unsuccessful.
Mr. Goldstone, in a June 7 follow-up email, wrote, “I will send the names of the two people meeting with you for security when I have them later today.”
By that time, as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Mr. Trump was already under the protection of the Secret Service and access to Trump Tower in New York was strictly controlled. Ms. Veselnitskaya told The Times that the person who accompanied her was an interpreter whom she declined to name.
After being informed that the Russian lawyer could not make the 3 p.m. time that had been proposed, and agreeing to move it by an hour, Donald Trump Jr. forwarded the entire email chain to Mr. Kushner’s company work email, and to Mr. Manafort at his Trump campaign email.
“Meeting got moved to 4 tomorrow at my offices,” he wrote on June 8. “Best, Don.”
Mr. Kushner recently disclosed the fact of the meeting, though not the content, in a revised form on which all those seeking top secret security clearances are required to list contacts with foreign government officials and their representatives. The Times reported in April [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/us/politics/jared-kushner-russians-security-clearance.html ] that he had failed to list his foreign contacts [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/us/politics/senate-jared-kushner-russia.html ], including with several Russians; his lawyer has called those omissions an error.
Mr. Manafort also disclosed that a meeting had occurred, and that Donald Trump Jr. had organized it, in response to one of the Russia-related congressional investigations.
Representatives for both men did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Ms. Veselnitskaya arrived the next day and was ushered into Donald Trump Jr.’s office for a meeting with what amounted to the Trump campaign’s brain trust.
Besides having politically connected clients, one of whom was under investigation by federal prosecutors at the time of the meeting, Ms. Veselnitskaya is well known for her lobbying efforts against the Magnitsky Act [ https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/hr6156 ], a 2012 law that punishes designated Russian human rights abusers by allowing the United States to seize their assets and keep them from entering the country. The law so angered Mr. Putin that he retaliated [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/world/americas/kremlin-adoptions-sanctions-russia.html ] by barring American families from adopting Russian children. Her activities and associations have brought her to the attention of the F.B.I., according to a former senior law enforcement official.
When first contacted by The Times on Saturday, Donald Trump Jr. portrayed the meeting this way: “It was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow-up.”
Responding to Queries
The next day, after The Times informed him that it was preparing an article that would say that the meeting also involved a discussion about potentially compromising material on Mrs. Clinton, he issued another statement: “I was asked to have a meeting by an acquaintance I knew from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant with an individual who I was told might have information helpful to the campaign. I was not told her name prior to the meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to attend, but told them nothing of the substance.”
He continued: “After pleasantries were exchanged, the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information. She then changed subjects and began discussing the adoption of Russian children and mentioned the Magnitsky Act. It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting.”
Mr. Goldstone recalled the meeting in much the same way.
Ms. Veselnitskaya offered “just a vague, generic statement about the campaign’s funding and how people, including Russian people, living all over the world donate when they shouldn’t donate” before turning to her anti-Magnitsky Act arguments, he said. “It was the most inane nonsense I’ve ever heard.”
Ms. Veselnitskaya, for her part, said in an statement to The Times sent this past weekend that “nothing at all about the presidential campaign” had been discussed at the Trump Tower meeting, adding that she had “never acted on behalf of the Russian government” and that she had “never discussed any of these matters with any representative of the Russian government.” She has not responded to requests for comment since.
A spokesman for Mr. Putin said on Monday that he did not know Ms. Veselnitskaya and that he had no knowledge of the June 2016 meeting.
Back in Washington, both the White House and a spokesman for President Trump’s lawyer have taken pains to distance the president from the meeting, saying that he did he not attend it and that he learned about it only recently, a point Donald Trump Jr. reiterated Tuesday in his interview on Fox News.
Mr. Agalarov did not respond to a request for comment.
Emin, the pop star at the center of it all, will not comment on the matter, either, Mr. Goldstone, his publicist, said on Monday. “Emin said to me that I could tell journalists that, you know, he has decided to go with just a straight no comment,” Mr. Goldstone said. “His reasoning for that is simply that he believes that by him commenting in any way from Russia, it once again will open this debate of Trump, Trump, Russia. Now here’s another person from Russia. Now he’s another person from Russia. So he wants to just not comment on the story. That’s his reasoning. It’s — the story will play out however it plays out.”
Sophia Kishkovsky contributed reporting.
Related Coverage:
Russian Hacking and Influence in the U.S. Election
Complete coverage of Russia’s campaign to disrupt the 2016 presidential election.
https://www.nytimes.com/news-event/russian-election-hacking
Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian Lawyer: The Story Behind the Story
A Russian lawyer was said to have dirt on Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump Jr. agreed to meet her. The tale of the email.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/us/politics/russia-trump-emails.html
How Trump’s ‘Miss Universe’ in Russia Became Ensnared in a Political Inquiry
JULY 11, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/us/politics/how-trumps-miss-universe-in-russia-became-ensnared-in-a-political-inquiry.html
A Conspiracy of Dunces
JULY 11, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/opinion/trump-russia-collusion.html
Mini-Donald’s Major Fail
JULY 11, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/opinion/donald-trump-jr.html
Rancor at White House as Russia Story Refuses to Let the Page Turn
JULY 11, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/us/politics/russia-trump.html
With Glare on Trump Children, Political Gets Personal for President
JULY 12, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/us/politics/trump-says-son-is-innocent-amid-reports-of-russia-meeting.html
Rob Goldstone, Trump Intermediary, Likes Silly Hats and Facebook
JULY 12, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/style/rob-goldstone-russia-trump.html
© 2017 The New York Times Company
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/us/politics/trump-russia-email-clinton.html [with (over 5,000) comments], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuZUNjFsgS8 [as embedded; with comments]
*
Trump Teased ‘Major’ News On Clinton Hours After Don Jr. Set Meeting On Russian Dirt
07/11/2017 Updated July 12, 2017
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-clinton-don-jr-russia_us_596562fee4b09b587d633d10 [with (separate) embedded video, and comments], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFIZ80Oqxxo [embedded; with comments]
*
New details emerge on Moscow real estate deal that led to the Trump-Kremlin alliance
Donald Trump, Aras Agalarov and Rob Goldstone.
(Photos: Sean Gallup/Getty Images; Sergei SavostyanovTASS via Getty Images; Adriel Reboh/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
By Michael Isikoff
July 11, 2017
While in Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant in November 2013, Donald Trump entered into a formal business deal with Aras Agalarov, a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin, to construct a Trump Tower in the Russian capital. He later assigned his son, Donald Trump Jr., to oversee the project, according to Rob Goldstone, the British publicist who arranged the controversial 2016 meeting between the younger Trump and a Kremlin-linked lawyer.
Trump has dismissed the idea he had any business deals in Russia, saying at one point last October, “I have nothing to do with Russia.”
But Goldstone’s account, provided in an extensive interview in March in New York, offers new details of the proposed Trump project that appears to have been further along than most previous reports have suggested, and even included a trip by Ivanka Trump to Moscow to identify potential sites.
According to the publicist, the project — structured as a licensing deal in which Agalarov would build the tower with Trump’s name on it — was only abandoned after the Russian economy floundered. The economic downturn resulted in part from sanctions imposed by the U.S. and the European Union following Russia’s intervention in Ukraine.
Goldstone’s version of events implies a possible explanation for Trump’s interest in lifting sanctions on Russia — a policy move his administration quietly pursued in its first few weeks [ https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-administrations-secret-efforts-ease-russia-sanctions-fell-short-231301145.html ] until it ran into strong opposition from members of Congress and officials within the State Department.
Goldstone placed Donald Trump Jr. at the center of the Trump Tower deal, saying that his father assigned his eldest son the job of moving the project to fruition after the signing of a “letter of intent” between the Trump Organization and Agalarov’s company, the Crocus Group. It is not clear if the future president personally signed the “letter of intent,” but Michael Cohen, a longtime lawyer for Trump, told Yahoo News Tuesday that it would have been standard practice for Trump, as president of the Trump Organization, to do so.
Donald Trump Jr. at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, July 18, 2016.
(Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Goldstone also said that Ivanka Trump flew to Moscow in 2014 and met with Emin Agalarov, the oligarch’s son, a pop singer and a vice president of the Crocus Group, to identify sites for the project. Confirming Goldstone’s account, Mother Jones [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/07/the-trump-russia-conspiracy-is-now-very-simple/ ] late Tuesday published a photo of Ivanka Trump and Emin Agalarov in Moscow in Feb. 2014.
Trump “put Donald Jr. in charge and then Ivanka went to Moscow to look around for what the location would be,” Goldstone said. But the plans for a Trump Tower fell apart because “the economy tanked in Russia’’ after the imposition of Western sanctions, he said.
Goldstone, a British-born publicist who once did worked for Michael Jackson, represents Emin Agalarov in his music career and was present in Moscow during the Miss Universe pageant when the Trump Tower project was discussed by Trump and Aras Agalarov. His role has gotten new attention this week after the New York Times disclosed that Goldstone emailed Donald Trump Jr. in June 2016 urging him to meet with a Russian lawyer to receive damaging information from the Russian government about Hillary Clinton.
Trump Jr. released his email exchange with Goldstone on Tuesday, confirming the key role of the publicist and, more significantly, the Agalarovs, in offering negative information about Clinton on behalf of the Kremlin. “Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting,” Goldstone wrote Trump Jr. on June 3, 2016.
A chief prosecutor in Russia “offered to provide the Trump campaign some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and would be very useful to your father. This is very high-level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support of Mr. Trump — helped along by Aras and Emin.”
Alan Garten, the chief lawyer for the Trump Organization, did not respond to requests for comment. In a telephone interview, Cohen, who is Trump’s personal lawyer, did not dispute any specific details of Goldstone’s account but offered to check them. He did not later respond. But Cohen adamantly rejected the idea there was anything improper about meeting with the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, given that Trump Jr. was told she might have information helpful to Trump’s campaign. “The purpose of the election is to win,” said Cohen, adding, “Why is this any different?” than the unverified “dossier” on Trump’s ties to Russia prepared by a former British spy working for a Washington research firm hired by his political opponents.
Trump Jr., accompanied by then campaign manager Paul Manafort and senior adviser Jared Kushner, met with the Russian lawyer at Goldstone’s request to review the information she purported to have. “He met with her face-to-face to determine” the validity of the advertised documents and “no information was provided.”
Goldstone had played a key role in helping to broker the initial decision by the Miss Universe pageant — then owned by the Trump Organization and NBC — to hold its 2013 contest [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/07/how-a-music-publicist-connected-trumps-inner-circle-to-a-russian-lawyer-peddling-clinton-dirt/ ] in Moscow.
According to Goldstone, he pitched the idea to Paula Schugart, then chief executive of Miss Universe, as a way to promote the music career of Emin Agalarov. Schugart was initially hesitant because of concerns about red tape in Moscow. “What if you had a partner who owns the biggest venue in Moscow?” Emin Agalarov responded, according to Goldstone’s account. “Between myself and my father, we can cut through the red tape. You have a new partner.”
The plans to bring Miss Universe to Moscow was announced by Trump in Las Vegas in June 2013 during the Miss USA contest. Trump at the time quickly expressed hope that it would lead to a meeting with Putin. “Do you think Putin will be going to the Miss Universe pageant in November in Moscow — if so, will he become my new best friend?” Trump had tweeted at the time.
A meeting with Putin never came off during Trump’s Moscow trip; the Kremlin expressed regret that the Russian president wouldn’t be able to fit it into his schedule on the day in question because he had a meeting with the King of Holland. But the trip gave Trump an opportunity to discuss the plans for the Trump Tower in Moscow with Agalarov, a billionaire who has been called “the Trump of Russia” and “Putin’s builder” because of massive construction projects he has done on behalf of the Kremlin. Just 10 days before the Miss Universe pageant, Putin had given Agalarov a prestigious award at a ceremony at the Kremlin: Order of Honor of the Russian Federation.
In an interview with Forbes [ https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2017/03/20/russian-billionaire-family-trump-ties-ongoing/ ] this March, Emin Agalarov confirmed the plans for Trump Tower in Moscow. “We thought that building a Trump Tower next to an Agalarov tower — having the two big names — could be a really cool project to execute,” Emin Agalarov told the magazine. Agalarov blamed the abandonment of the project on Trump’s decision to run for president, rather than the imposition of sanctions. “He ran for president, so we dropped the idea,” Agalarov said. “But if he hadn’t run, we would probably be in the construction phase today.”
But Emin Agalarov said he and the now president have continued to stay in touch, saying that Trump sent a handwritten note to the Agalaovs in November after they congratulated him on his victory. “Now that he ran and was elected, he does not forget his friends.”
Read more:
Pence distances himself from Trump Jr. revelations
https://www.yahoo.com/news/pence-distances-self-trump-jr-revelations-173223677.html
Copyright 2017 Yahoo News
https://www.yahoo.com/news/new-details-emerge-moscow-real-estate-deal-led-trump-kremlin-alliance-190126219.html [with (approaching 10,000) comments]
*
6 things to watch for next in the Donald Trump Jr. saga
1) Rob Goldstone seemed to casually mention the Russian government's support for Trump, and Trump Jr. didn't remark on it. Why?
2) Who is the “Crown prosecutor of Russia”?
3) How close is Veselnitskaya to the Kremlin?
4) Did Trump Jr. talk to Agalarov about his information?
5) Did this information ever get disclosed to the president?
6) Do Democrats intensify talk of collusion, conspiracy, soliciting foreign contributions, treason, impeachment or all of the above?
July 11, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/11/6-things-to-watch-for-next-in-the-donald-trump-jr-saga/ [with embedded video, and comments]
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The Everybody-Does-It Defense of Collusion
After months of vehement denials, Trump supporters and surrogates are trying a new tack: If collusion occurred, it was no big deal.
Jul 11, 2017
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/the-everybody-does-it-defense-of-collusion/533325/ [with comments]
*
‘Category 5 hurricane’: White House under siege by Trump Jr.’s Russia revelations
By Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker
July 11, 2017 Updated July 11, 2017
The White House has been thrust into chaos after days of ever-worsening revelations about a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a lawyer characterized as representing the Russian government, as the president fumes against his enemies and senior aides circle one another with suspicion, according to top White House officials and outside advisers.
President Trump — who has been hidden from public view since returning last weekend from a divisive international summit — is enraged that the Russia cloud still hangs over his presidency and is exasperated that his eldest son and namesake has become engulfed by it, said people who have spoken with him this week.
The disclosure that Trump Jr. met with a Russian attorney, believing he would receive incriminating information about Hillary Clinton as part of the Kremlin’s effort to boost his father’s candidacy, has set back the administration’s faltering agenda and rattled the senior leadership team.
Even supporters of Trump Jr. who believe he faces no legal repercussions privately acknowledged Tuesday that the story is a public relations disaster — for him as well as for the White House. One outside ally called it a “Category 5 hurricane,” while an outside adviser said a CNN graphic charting connections between the Trump team and Russians resembled the plot of the fictional Netflix series “House of Cards.”
Even Vice President Pence sought to distance himself from the controversy, with his spokesman noting that Trump Jr.’s meeting occurred before Pence joined the ticket.
Inside a White House in which infighting often seems like a core cultural value, three straight days of revelations in the New York Times about Trump Jr. have inspired a new round of accusations and recriminations, with advisers privately speculating about who inside the Trump orbit may be leaking damaging information about the president’s son.
This portrait of the Trump White House under siege is based on interviews Tuesday with more than a dozen West Wing officials, outside advisers, and friends and associates of the president and his family, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid.
The makeup of Trump’s inner circle is the subject of internal debate, as ever. Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and senior adviser; Jared Kushner, her husband and another senior adviser; and first lady Melania Trump have been privately pressing the president to shake up his team — most specifically by replacing Reince Priebus as the White House chief of staff, according to two senior White House officials and one ally close to the White House.
The three family members are especially concerned about the steady stream of unauthorized leaks to journalists that have plagued the administration over the nearly six months that President Trump has been in office, from sensitive national security information to embarrassing details about the inner workings of the White House, the officials said.
Stephanie Grisham, the first lady’s communications director, said: “Of course, the first lady is concerned about leaks from her husband’s administration, as all Americans should be. And while she does offer advice and perspectives on many things, Mrs. Trump does not weigh in on West Wing staff.”
Lindsay Walters, a deputy White House press secretary, disputed reports about Priebus’s standing. “These sources have been consistently wrong about Reince, and they’re still wrong today,” she said.
White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner walk together during the Congressional Picnic on the South Lawn of the White House on June 22.
(Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
After this story first published, Josh Raffel, a White House spokesman, said in a statement on behalf of Kushner and Ivanka Trump: “Jared and Ivanka are focused on working with Reince and the team to advance the President’s agenda and not on pushing for staff changes.”
Trump recently publicly praised Priebus’s work ethic, and the chief of staff’s allies note that Priebus has done as good a job as can be expected under the unique circumstances of this administration. Defenders of Priebus have long said they expect him to make it to a year in the position, and Trump is said to be hesitant to fire him or any other senior staffer amid the escalating Russia investigation led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
The mind-set of Trump Jr. over the past few days has evolved from distress to anger to defiance, according to people close to him. He hired a criminal defense attorney but maintains that he is innocent of any wrongdoing. After his tweets commenting on the matter drew scrutiny, he agreed to his first media interview — with his friend Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity on his show on Tuesday night.
One friend of Trump Jr.’s said the presidential son saw the Hannity appearance as an opportunity to give his version of Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” speech, a 1952 address in which the then-vice-presidential candidate defended himself against accusations of financial improprieties.
Trump has had no public events since returning Saturday night from Germany but has been closely monitoring developments with his eldest son in the news.
Trump continues to view the Russia controversy as an excuse used by Democrats for losing an election they thought they would win — and an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of his victory, aides said. They said that the president’s frustration is based on the media coverage of his son’s actions, as opposed to the actions themselves.
“He just looks at this as the continuum of taking a group of unrelated facts and putting them together in concentric circles and saying, ‘Aha — look what happened!’ ” said Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a longtime friend of the president who was chairman of the Presidential Inaugural Committee. “With Don Jr., whatever set of facts there are may not lead to the conclusion that the establishment media is making.”
Trump and his advisers are deeply frustrated that the disclosure by Trump Jr. has overshadowed the positive coverage they expected to receive from the president’s trip abroad, as well as other issues they hoped to spotlight this week, such as the Senate health-care bill and trade.
A handful of Republican operatives close to the White House are scrambling to Trump Jr.’s defense and have begun what could be an extensive campaign to try to discredit some of the journalists who have been reporting on the matter.
Their plan, as one member of the team described it, is to research the reporters’ previous work, in some cases going back years, and to exploit any mistakes or perceived biases. They intend to demand corrections, trumpet errors on social media and feed them to conservative outlets, such as Fox News.
But one outside adviser said a campaign against the press when it comes to Trump Jr.’s meeting could be futile: “The meeting happened. It’s tough to go to war with the facts.”
In the West Wing, meanwhile, fear of the Mueller probe effectively paralyzed senior staffers as they struggled to respond.
No official has yet delivered a robust defense of Trump Jr., although Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the principal deputy press secretary, told reporters Monday, “I would certainly say Don Jr. did not collude with anybody to influence the election.”
At Tuesday’s press briefing, Sanders read a brief statement from the president — “My son is a high-quality person and I applaud his transparency” — but declined to speak further on the issue, referring all questions to Trump Jr.’s attorney.
Other senior White House officials were hesitant to talk about Trump Jr. — even on the condition of anonymity — for fear of exposing themselves legally.
Some top officials, as well as outside advisers, had earlier suggested that the White House conduct its own internal review to identify any potential problem areas related to Russia so that it can release the information on its own rather than be caught unaware by news reports. But that notion went nowhere, in part because officials were afraid to discuss any potential Russia interactions that could make them targets of Mueller’s probe.
One White House official went so far as to stop communicating with the president’s embattled son, although this official spoke sympathetically about his plight, casting Trump Jr. as someone who just wants to hunt, fish and run his family’s real estate business.
“The kid is an honest kid,” said one friend of Trump Jr. “The White House should’ve never let that story go out on the president’s son.... What he’s upset about was that it was a minor meeting and the media glare — anything that’s Russia-related, gets picked up the way roaches get caught in a roach motel.”
Eric Trump, another son of the president, defended his older brother Tuesday night by retweeting a message [ https://twitter.com/EricTrump/status/884897415010041857 ] from British politician Nigel Farage, who said Trump Jr. was under attack because he is “the best public supporter” of the president. Eric Trump tweeted: “This is the EXACT reason they viciously attack our family! They can’t stand that we are extremely close and will ALWAYS support each other.”
Critics of Trump Jr. counter that he should have known better than to accept a meeting with someone who was explicitly described in an email as a “Russian government attorney.”
“It wasn’t naivete,” said Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia in the Obama administration. “It was, ‘Oh, they have some dirt on our opponent and I’m eager to receive it.’ Nobody thought to think, ‘Well, how did they obtain that? Is this coming from the Russian government, Russian intelligence?’ Those are the kinds of obvious questions that should have been asked, in my opinion.”
Pence found out about Trump Jr.’s meeting with the Russian attorney Friday evening in advance of the first Times story, said one person familiar with the discussions. Both Pence and his team view the Russia coverage as a distraction, and are working to keep the vice president clear of it and focused on Trump’s policy goals — such as health care, the subject of his scheduled visit to Kentucky on Wednesday.
“The vice president is working every day to advance the president’s agenda, which is what the American people sent us here to do. The vice president was not aware of the meeting,” Pence’s press secretary, Marc Lotter, said in a statement. “He is not focused on stories about the campaign, particularly stories about the time before he joined the ticket.”
On Capitol Hill — where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced Tuesday that he is delaying his chamber’s August recess by two weeks — Republican senators were becoming increasingly frustrated with the White House, which they blame for Congress’s inability to pass any major legislation.
A growing number of senators believe that the widening Russia probe — as well as the Trump-fueled tumult that seems to dominate nearly every news cycle — have stalled their legislative agenda, leaving them nothing to offer their constituents by way of achievements when they head home over the break.
Read more:
Donald Trump Jr. was told campaign meeting would be with ‘Russian government attorney,’ according to emails
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/donald-trump-jr-was-told-campaign-meeting-would-be-with-russian-government-lawyer-according-to-emails/2017/07/11/70b957e2-664c-11e7-9928-22d00a47778f_story.html
The Take: Trump Jr.’s emails offer a revelation unlike any other in the Russia probe
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-revelation-unlike-any-other-in-the-russia-investigation/2017/07/11/7985fa14-666b-11e7-8eb5-cbccc2e7bfbf_story.html
Donald Trump Jr. may have crossed the legal line on collusion
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/11/donald-trump-jr-may-have-just-crossed-the-legal-line-on-collusion/
Trump Jr. could be in legal jeopardy, but analysts said more would be required for a criminal case
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-jrs-emails-could-put-him-in-legal-jeopardy-but-more-would-be-required-for-criminal-case-analysts-say/2017/07/11/02985360-6653-11e7-8eb5-cbccc2e7bfbf_story.html
Donald Trump Jr.’s emails about the meeting with a Russian lawyer, annotated
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/11/donald-trump-jr-s-emails-about-meeting-a-russian-government-attorney-annotated/
Russian lawyer who met with Trump Jr. has long history fighting sanctions
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/russian-lawyer-who-met-with-trump-jr-has-long-history-fighting-sanctions/2017/07/11/05e2467c-65b1-11e7-94ab-5b1f0ff459df_story.html
Assessing how ‘open’ and ‘transparent’ Donald Trump Jr. was in his Hannity appearance
July 12, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/07/12/assessing-how-open-and-transparent-donald-trump-jr-was-in-his-hannity-appearance/
‘You may actually learn a thing or two’: Sean Hannity’s message to the media, annotated
July 12, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/12/you-may-actually-learn-a-thing-or-two-sean-hannitys-message-to-the-media-annotated/
© 2017 The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/category-5-hurricane-white-house-under-siege-by-trump-jrs-russia-revelations/2017/07/11/1e091478-664d-11e7-8eb5-cbccc2e7bfbf_story.html [with embedded video, and (over 13,000) comments], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puNQMJmWk7o [with comments], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExcDi9a9His [with comments], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmHkYcRI-hk [with comments], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZpGc7zTS-E [with comments]
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Why Donald Trump's Russia Denials Can No Longer Be Believed
His son’s attempt to get dirt on Hillary Clinton shows the president to be either deeply clueless about his own campaign, or a shameless liar.
Jul 12, 2017
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/why-donald-trumps-russia-denials-cannot-be-believed/533376/ [with comments]
Trump says son is 'innocent' over emails about Russian campaign help
July 12, 2017
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-statement-idUSKBN19X19C
Exclusive: Trump says he was unaware of son's meeting with Russian lawyer
July 12, 2017
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-interview-idUSKBN19X2XF
When a Witch Hunt Finds Real Witches
Let’s take another look at Donald Trump Jr.’s email traffic, shall we?
July 12, 2017
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/12/when-a-witch-hunt-finds-real-witches-215368 [with comments]
In Trump's Ohio bastion, supporters dismiss uproar over Donald Jr.
July 12, 2017
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-ohio-idUSKBN19X2TN
The Latest: Trump wishes he’d asked Putin who he supported
Jul 12, 2017
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on the controversy surrounding a meeting last summer between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer promising damaging information on Hillary Clinton (all times local):
8:30 p.m.
President Donald Trump says there’s one question he wishes he would have asked Russian President Vladimir Putin during their meeting in Germany last week: “Were you actually supporting me?”
That’s what Trump tells Reuters in a White House interview Wednesday before departing for Paris, France.
U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that Russia meddled in the 2016 election in order to bolster Trump’s candidacy and weaken his rival, Hillary Clinton.
But Trump is doubting that conclusion. He says that his commitment to building up the military and increasing U.S. energy production stand opposed to Putin’s aims.
He says: “It’s really the one question I wish I would have asked Putin: Were you actually supporting me?”
Trump also insists the White House “is functioning beautifully” despite what he calls a “hoax made up by the Democrats".
* * *
8:30 p.m.
President Donald Trump is refusing to dispute Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assertion that Trump believed him when he said that Russia didn’t meddle in the 2016 election during their meeting last week.
Asked in an interview with Reuters Wednesday whether he believed Putin, Trump continued to question the conclusion of U.S. intelligence officials that Russia meddled to help Trump win.
He says: “Look. Something happened and we have to find out what it is, because we can’t allow a thing like that to happen to our election process.”
But he added of Putin: “Somebody did say if he did do it you wouldn’t have found out about it. Which is a very interesting point.”
Still Trump insists that “There was zero coordination” between his campaign and Russia,” adding: “It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
* * *
[...]
https://www.apnews.com/00ca32fc6f024c81b19a638c99572e7b/The-Latest:-Trump-wishes-he'd-asked-Putin-who-he-supported
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HEATED INTERVIEW: Anderson Cooper GRILLS Trump Lackey Sebastian Gorka on Trump & Russia
Published on Jul 12, 2017 by Dose of Dissonance [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv7bObYhwkJQM9dSelNbRNQ , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv7bObYhwkJQM9dSelNbRNQ/videos ]
FULL INTERVIEW: CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360" - JULY 12, 2017. Anderson Cooper grills Trump's Sebastian Gorka on Trump & Russia.
Anderson Cooper to White House official: 'I'm just going to ignore the insults'
July 13, 2017 Updated July 13, 2017
http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/13/politics/cooper-gorka-exchange-trump-jr-emails-cnntv/index.html [with embedded video]
[unofficial upload for the moment at least at] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxcidbnqOzs [with comments] [no official upload (yet) available at https://www.youtube.com/user/CNN/videos ] [and again, see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=129013931 and preceding and following]
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Hannity: Collusion outrage is pointed in wrong direction
The double standard and hypocrisy is disgusting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1vvzxf8PIA [with comments]
Gingrich: Will Mueller investigate Democrats and Ukraine?
Former House speaker weighs in on allegations of collusion on 'Hannity'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOWuaqAaGYc [with comments]
Gingrich slams House, Senate GOP handling of investigations
Former House speaker accuses top Republicans of 'sleepwalking' on 'Hannity'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS4_nDjxvlE [with comments]
Conway speaks out about 'actual' examples of collusion
Senior counselor to President Trump reacts to Donald Trump Jr.'s interview on 'Hannity'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT99KiOLg0s [with comments]
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Bungled collusion is still collusion
July 13, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bungled-collusion-is-still-collusion/2017/07/13/68c7f72a-67f3-11e7-8eb5-cbccc2e7bfbf_story.html [with embedded video, and comments] , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdojX5iBH7Q [with comments]
An administration without a conscience
By Michael Gerson
July 13, 2017
Given what we know about the collusion — and there is no other word for it — between then-candidate Donald Trump’s most senior advisers and what they thought was a Kremlin-tied lawyer offering dirt [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/is-donald-trump-jrs-i-love-it-email-a-smoking-gun-or-a-distraction/2017/07/11/be6af2d8-666b-11e7-a1d7-9a32c91c6f40_story.html ] on Hillary Clinton, the most shocking thing is that no one on the Trump side was shocked. The most offensive thing is that no one took offense. Trump’s son, son-in-law and campaign manager treated the offer of aid by a hostile foreign power to tilt an election as just another day at the office. “I think many people would have held that meeting,” the president affirmed [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/07/12/i-think-many-people-would-have-held-that-meeting-trump-says-of-sons-huddle-with-russian-lawyer/ ]. It is the banality of this corruption that makes it so appalling. The president and his men are incapable of feeling shame about shameful things.
Donald Jr. certainly doesn’t know what all the fuss is about. Instead of offering a hint of contrition, he offered a complaint that the proffered information was not particularly useful. “I applaud his transparency,” father said of son [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/07/12/president-says-donald-trump-jr-is-open-transparent-and-innocent/ ]. But disclosure is not really a virtue if you are admitting highly unethical actions without apology. It is more like the public confession of serious wrongdoing, and the attempted normalization of sliminess.
The ultimate explanation for this toxic moral atmosphere is President Trump himself. He did not attend the meeting, but he is fully responsible for creating and marketing an ethos in which victory matters more than character and real men write their own rules. Trumpism is an easygoing belief system that indulges and excuses the stiffing of contractors, the conning of students, the bilking of investors, the exploitation of women and the practices of nepotism and self-dealing. A faith that makes losing a sin will make cheating a sacrament.
Republicans have sometimes employed the excuse that members of the Trump team are new to politics — babes in the woods — who don’t yet understand all the ins and outs. Their innocence, the argument goes, is proved by their guilt. This might apply to minor infractions of campaign finance law. It does not cover egregious acts of wrongdoing. Putting a future president in the debt of a foreign power — and subject, presumably, to blackmail by that power — is the height of sleazy stupidity. It is not a mistake born of greenness; it is evidence of a vacant conscience.
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/in-trumps-world-innocence-is-proved-by-guilt/2017/07/13/07e69a82-67ea-11e7-8eb5-cbccc2e7bfbf_story.html [with embedded videos, and comments]
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Kushner pushed for more aggressive defense of Trump Jr. meeting
Trump’s son-in-law has urged the press shop to go into combat mode over the latest Russia scandal twist.
07/13/2017 Updated 07/13/2017
Jared Kushner has been pressing other White House aides to more vigorously defend the meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Kremlin-linked lawyer that Kushner also attended, but has faced resistance from some of Trump’s top press aides, according to six sources familiar with the matter.
Four White House officials and two outside advisers say Kushner wants the White House to more aggressively push out surrogates and talking points to change the narrative around the latest twist in the Russia scandal. Kushner has said the meeting, which has also further dragged him into the controversy, has a direct impact on Trump's presidency, even if Trump wasn't aware of it at the time.
But some of the communications aides, including press secretary Sean Spicer, and other senior staffers have expressed reservations. They say it’s best to leave it to outside counsel to handle the furor around Trump Jr., and fear inviting further legal jeopardy if Trump aides and allies more forcefully defend a meeting that they don’t fully know the details of, according to the sources.
The disagreement over strategy illustrates the White House’s ongoing struggle to cope with a quickly evolving scandal that has engulfed Trump’s early presidency. West Wing aides have had little control as Trump himself has appeared to exacerbate the Russia controversy, including by firing FBI Director James Comey. Some top advisers also have been blindsided by new developments, such as the Russian lawyer meeting during the height of the campaign.
After hours of little defense from the White House on Tuesday following Trump Jr.’s release of the email chain setting up the controversial meeting, Kushner spoke with Spicer and deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. During the conversation, Spicer and Sanders made the case for crafting a longer-term battle strategy, according two White House officials and an outside adviser familiar with the conversation, but Kushner called for full-on combat, according to a White House official.
A source close to Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a top White House adviser, said that while he doesn’t have an exact plan for an overall Russia response, he was angry that there wasn’t a more robust effort from the communications team. Kushner wanted them to complain about chyrons on cable news, call reporters to update stories with White House statements, and unleash surrogates immediately. He was angry that there were no talking points offered to surrogates, the source said. One senior administration official suggested that two aides from the communications shop be dedicated to updating chyrons.
"Jared didn’t like the idea, he wanted people to get aggressive,” said an outside adviser who was briefed on the meeting. "Jared’s the guy who is rushing the front lines, and other people are saying, 'See, wait, hold, and let’s get a battle strategy.'”
"Jared wanted to get surrogates, he wanted an op-ed in The [Wall Street] Journal and The [New York] Times, and we said, ‘Wait, we have to talk through how that will play out. Who is going to say it, who is going to put their name on the op-ed and what baggage do they have?’" the outside adviser also said.
While some in the White House have argued that this is an outside legal issue since Trump Jr. does not work in the White House, Kushner has said if the story affects the president, it's a White House issue.
The White House disputed that Kushner had a conversation directly complaining to top communications officials about the Russia scandal defense.
"These conversations simply did not happen and Jared did not raise a single one of these points besides saying thank you to everyone for their continued hard work," the White House said in a statement attributed to Spicer, Sanders, spokesman Josh Raffel and other White House aides including Raj Shah, Jessica Ditto and Lindsay Walters.
[...]
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/07/13/kushner-pushed-aggressive-defense-russia-meeting-240535 [with comments]
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Trump Jr. pitch was part of broad Russian effort
07/13/17
Two months before Donald Trump Jr.’s encounter with a Russian figure, a key House subcommittee chairman received a similar overture in Moscow offering derogatory information about a U.S. policy that was upsetting Vladimir Putin.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican with a reputation as a Moscow ally in Congress, told The Hill the information he received in April 2016 came from the chief prosecutor in Moscow and painted an alternative picture of the Russian fraud case that led to the passage of anti-Russia legislation in Congress known as the Magnitsky Act.
[...]
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/341946-trump-jr-pitch-was-part-of-broad-russian-effort [with embedded video, and (approaching 6,000) comments]
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Sources: Trump lawyers knew of Russia emails back in June
President Donald Trump and son Donald Trump Jr.
(Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Alex Brandon/AP, Matt York/AP)
By Michael Isikoff
July 13, 2017 Updated July 14, 2017
President Trump’s legal team was informed more than three weeks ago about the email chain showing that his son Donald Jr. met with a Kremlin-connected lawyer last June, two sources familiar with the handling of the matter told Yahoo News.
Trump told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday that he learned just “a couple of days ago” that his son, Donald Trump Jr, had met with the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya [ https://www.yahoo.com/news/natalia-veselnitskaya-russian-lawyer-met-donald-trump-jr-231050033.html ], after receiving emails that she would supply him with information that “would incriminate Hillary” and was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” That was the day after Donald Jr. released [ https://www.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-trump-says-unaware-sons-meeting-russian-lawyer-212645133.html ] the email exchanges himself, after learning they would be published by the New York Times.
Trump repeated that assertion in a talk with reporters Air Force One on his way to Paris Wednesday night. “I only heard about it two or three days ago,” he said according to a transcript of his talk when asked about the meeting with Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in June 2016 attended by Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign chief, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
But the sources told Yahoo News that Marc Kasowitz, the president’s chief lawyer in the Russia investigation, and Alan Garten, executive vice president and chief legal officer of the Trump Organization, were both informed about the emails in the third week of June, after they were discovered by lawyers for Kushner, who is now a senior White House official.
On June 8, 2016, Trump Jr. had forwarded an email [ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/11/us/politics/donald-trump-jr-email-text.html ] to Kushner and Manafort about the upcoming meeting with the subject line: “FW: Russia-Clinton-private & confidential.”
The discovery of the emails prompted Kushner to amend his security clearance form to reflect the meeting, which he had failed to report when he originally sought clearance for his White House job. That revision — his second — to the so-called SF-86 [ https://www.opm.gov/forms/pdf_fill/sf86-non508.pdf ], was done on June 21. Kushner made the change even though there were questions among his lawyers whether the meeting had to be reported, given that there was no clear evidence that Veselntiskya was a government official. The change to the security form prompted the FBI to question Kushner on June 23, the second time he was interviewed by agents about his security clearance, the sources said.
But the information that Trump’s lawyers were told about the emails in June raises questions about why they would not have immediately informed the president. Trump’s campaign is under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into possible collusion with Russian government officials. The emails appear to be the first hard evidence of contacts between top campaign officials and someone connected to the Kremlin.
A spokesman for Kasowitz declined to comment, saying the matter involved “privileged information.” Garten did not respond to an email request for comment.
Pushing back the discovery of the emails to June 21 also raises additional questions about the initial public statements made by the White House after the existence of the meeting was first reported by the New York Times on July 8. At that time, Trump, Jr. issued a public statement [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html ] describing the session as a “short introductory meeting” in which the primary topic of discussion was “the adoption of Russian children” by American families.” The actual purpose of the meeting, to obtain damaging information about Hillary Clinton ostensibly collected by the Russian government, wasn’t mentioned in Trump’s initial statement.
The next day, Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, said in an interview [ http://www.politico.com/story/2017/07/09/priebus-trump-big-nothing-burger-240328 ] that the meeting was a “big nothing burger.”
The president himself repeatedly described the Russia investigation as “fake news” and ridiculed television networks’ reports about it. “With four months looking at Russia…under a magnifying glass, they have ‘zero tapes’ of T people colluding. There is no collusion & no obstruction. I should be given an apology!” the president wrote in two tweets [ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/879323238425395200 , https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/879324620159160322 ] on June 26.
Aside from questions about the credibility of White House statements, the disclosure of the emails potentially has raised new questions about Kushner’s security clearance. He initially filed his SF-86 on Jan. 18, leaving out any mention of meetings with foreign government officials during the transition and the campaign. His lawyers have said this was inadvertent and that a member of his staff had prematurely hit the “send” button for the firm before it was completed. Within twelve hours, they have said, Kushner notified the FBI that he would make amendments and disclose his meetings with foreign officials.
This was followed by a revised security clearance submission on May 11 in which Kushner reported more than 100 meetings with officials from over 20 countries, including a meeting with the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and another with Sergey Gorkov, the head of Russian state-owned bank [ http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/02/politics/jared-kushner-russian-banker-what-we-know/index.html ].
The revised security clearance led to Kushner’s first FBI interview about the matter in mid-May, the sources said. The bureau is now reviewing Kushner’s second amended form following the new disclosure about his meeting with the Russian lawyer. His lawyers are confident that it won’t raise any additional problems since, as they have asserted, Kushner had forgotten the meeting — he was only briefly present — and had no intent to conceal it. In the meantime, he has an interim security clearance.
Copyright 2017 Yahoo News
https://www.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/sources-trump-lawyers-knew-russia-emails-back-june-000320831.html [with (over 7,000) comments]
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Neither Trump nor the GOP will recover anytime soon
By Jennifer Rubin
July 14, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/07/14/neither-trump-nor-the-gop-will-recover-anytime-soon/ [with embedded video, and comments]
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Former Soviet Counterintelligence Officer at Meeting With Donald Trump Jr. and Russian Lawyer
by Ken Dilanian, Natasha Lebedeva and Hallie Jackson
Jul 14 2017, 9:35 am ET
WASHINGTON — The Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. and others on the Trump team after a promise of compromising material on Hillary Clinton was accompanied by a Russian-American lobbyist — a former Soviet counterintelligence officer who is suspected by some U.S. officials of having ongoing ties to Russian intelligence, NBC News has learned.
The lobbyist, first identified by the Associated Press as Rinat Akhmetshin, denies any current ties to Russian spy agencies. He accompanied the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, to the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower attended by Donald Trump Jr.; Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law; and Paul Manafort, former chairman of the Trump campaign.
Born in Russia, Akhmetshin served in the Soviet military and emigrated to the U.S., where he holds dual citizenship. He did not respond to NBC News requests for comment Friday, but he told the AP the meeting was not substantive. “I never thought this would be such a big deal, to be honest,” he told the AP.
He had been working with Veselnitskaya on a campaign against the Magnitsky Act, a set of sanctions against alleged Russian human rights violators. That issue, which is also related to a ban on American adoptions of Russian children, is what Veselnitskaya told NBC News she discussed with the Trump team.
But, given the email traffic suggesting the meeting was part of a Russian effort help Trump’s candidacy, the presence at the meeting of a Russian-American with suspected intelligence ties is likely to be of interest to special counsel Robert Mueller and the House and Senate panels investigating the Russian election interference campaign.
As has been previously reported, the meeting was set up by music publicist Rob Goldstone, who told Donald Trump Jr. in an email chain that Veselnitskaya has "information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father."
Goldstone called Veselnitskaya a "Russian government attorney" — though she disputes that — and said the information was "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump.”
The Associated Press quoted Akhmetshin [ https://apnews.com/dceed1008d8f45afb314aca65797762a/Russian-American-lobbyist-says-he-was-in-Trump-son's-meeting ] saying that Veselnitskaya brought with her to the meeting a plastic folder with printed-out documents that detailed what she believed was a flow of illicit funds to the Democratic National Committee.
The lobbyist said Veselnitskaya presented the contents of the documents to the Trump team, suggesting it could help the Trump campaign, he said.
“This could be a good issue to expose how the D.N.C. is accepting bad money,” The AP quoted Akhmetshin recalling her saying.
Veselnitskaya told a slightly different story in her interview with NBC News.
She said she brought with her a two-page document, one small part of which involved alleged D.N.C. funding issues. Most of it involved allegations against the Magnitsky sanctions, she said.
Donald Trump Jr., she said, asked if she had any further supporting documents.
“He clearly asked me if I had any financial records to back and support the idea that some funds from illegal sources went to DNC, went to Hilary Clinton," she told NBC News. “In reply to that, I told him that not only I don't have any financial records of that time — there was no chance that I could somehow, anyhow, have such records.”
She added that Trump Jr. ended the meeting by saying, “Well, the story that you've told us, it sounds very interesting but unfortunately at the moment, there is nothing that we, we can help you with about it. But maybe if we come to power, maybe one day, we will get back to you on that, because it really sounds interesting.”
Contacted by NBC News, representatives for Kushner and Manafort declined to comment.
On April 4, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter [ https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2017-04-04%20CEG%20to%20DHS%20(Akhmetshin%20Information)%20with%20attachment.pdf ] to the Homeland Security department seeking information about Akhmetshin, saying that Akhmetshin admitted to being a Soviet counterintelligence officer.
Grassley said Akhmetshin had failed to register as a foreign agent even though he had been lobbying in the U.S. for Russian interests. Grassley also charged that Akhmetshin had been working with Fusion GPS, an opposition-research firm that had compiled a highly disputed dossier on Donald Trump.
Fusion GPS has also worked on the campaign to raise questions about the story behind the Magnitsky Act.
Alan Futerfas, the attorney retained by Donald Trump Jr., told NBC News two other people accompanied Veselnitskaya to the meeting — someone Futerfas described as a translator and someone he described as a "friend of Emin [Agalarov]’s and maybe as a friend of Natalia [Veselnitskaya]’s.”
Futerfas said he has talked with that individual. "He is a U.S. citizen. He told me specifically he was not working for the Russian government, and in fact laughed when I asked him that question.”
It was not clear whether Futerfas was referring to Akhmetshin.
Agalarov is a pop star and a client of Rob Goldstone [ http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/rob-goldstone-man-behind-trump-jr-meeting-music-publicist-ties-n781931 ], a music publicist who arranged the meeting with Trump Jr. Agalarov appeared in a music video with Trump [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuZUNjFsgS8 (embedded in the fullpost above of the NYT article "Russian Dirt on Clinton? ‘I Love It,’ Donald Trump Jr. Said")] when the Miss Universe pageant, which Trump owned at the time, was held in Moscow in 2013.
Futerfas confirmed that, “for the purpose of security or otherwise, the names were reviewed” but said Trump Jr. knew nothing about the man's background at the time of the meeting.
When asked about whether he had concerns, knowing what he knows now, Futerfas responded: “I have absolutely no concerns about what was said in that meeting.”
Veselnitskaya, in an exclusive interview with NBC News [ http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russian-lawyer-who-met-trump-jr-i-didn-t-have-n781631 ], denied having any connection to the Kremlin and insisted the meeting was to discuss sanctions, not the presidential campaign.
In an email exchange released by Trump Jr. [ http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-jr-tweets-his-emails-led-russia-meeting-n781736 ], the president's eldest son wrote "I love it" to Goldstone when told about possibly getting his hands on material potentially damaging to the Clinton campaign.
Goldstone told Trump Jr. that the meeting would be with a "Russian government attorney" and that the information was "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." Trump Jr. responded enthusiastically, "If it's what you say I love it especially later in the summer."
Trump Jr. said after releasing the emails that, "in retrospect, I probably would have done things a little differently."
President Trump has defended his son's decision [ http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-defends-son-s-meeting-russian-lawyer-n782606 ] to meet with Veselnitskaya, saying "most people would have taken that meeting."
"My son is a wonderful young man. He took a meeting with a Russian lawyer, not a government lawyer but a Russian lawyer," Trump said Thursday in a joint press conference in Paris with French President Emmanuel Macron. "From a practical standpoint most people would have taken that meeting. It's called opposition research or research into your opponent."
Ken Dilanian and Natasha Lebedeva reported from Washington. Hallie Jackson reported from Paris.
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/russian-lawyer-brought-ex-soviet-counter-intelligence-officer-trump-team-n782851 [with embedded videos]
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Russian Lawyer Who Trump Jr. Met Says She Was in Contact With Top Russian Prosecutor
Natalia Veselnitskaya, the lawyer who Donald Trump Jr. met with in June 2016, spoke to journalists in Moscow on Tuesday.
Photo: Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press
[ https://apnews.com/bfd966c5f3354a4d8a650129eca35deb ]
In interview, Natalia Veselnitskaya says she talked with Kremlin-appointed official about U.S. sanctions law
By Brett Forrest and Paul Sonne
July 14, 2017 4:23 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON—The Russian lawyer [ https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-jr-met-russian-lawyer-who-claimed-to-have-helpful-campaign-information-1499646830 ] whom Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort met last year with the hopes of receiving damaging information about Hillary Clinton says she talked with the office of Russia’s top prosecutor while waging a campaign against a U.S. sanctions law and the hedge-fund manager who backed it.
Lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya said she wasn’t working for Russian authorities, but she said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that she was meeting with Russian authorities regularly, and shared information about the hedge-fund manager with the Russian prosecutor general’s office, including with Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika, a top official appointed by the Kremlin.
“I personally know the general prosecutor,” Ms. Veselnitskaya said. “In the course of my investigation [about the fund manager], I shared information with him.”
Mr. Chaika’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment on whether he knows and received information from Ms. Veselnitskaya.
President Donald Trump and others have stressed that she wasn’t formally working for the Russian government at the time of the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower. Mr. Trump said on Thursday at a news conference in Paris [ https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-defends-sons-decision-to-meet-with-russian-lawyer-1499968541 ] that his son’s meeting was brief and uneventful. “He took a meeting with a Russian lawyer. Not a government lawyer, but a Russian lawyer,” Mr. Trump said.
Ms. Veselnitskaya says she was working to spread information about William Browder, the U.S.-born fund manager turned Kremlin critic, who lobbied for passage of a 2012 U.S. law that incensed Moscow. The law, known as the Magnitsky Act [ https://blogs.wsj.com/corruption-currents/2012/12/14/obama-signs-magnitsky-act-into-law/ ], sanctioned Russians accused of defrauding Mr. Browder’s firm in Russia out of $230 million and causing the death of his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who died in Russian custody.
Also working on the anti-Magnitsky Act effort was a former Soviet military serviceman turned U.S. lobbyist, Renat Akhmetshin, who told the Journal that he attended the meeting at Trump Tower. Mr. Akhmetshin’s presence at the meeting wasn’t previously disclosed by Donald Trump Jr. or the White House.
The multiyear saga between Russia and Mr. Browder has featured accusations of murder and fraud, extensive lobbying efforts on both sides, high-level court proceedings and public statements by Russian President Vladimir Putin suggesting Mr. Browder is a criminal. And now, the drama has extended to the Trump White House, which is already facing probes into the campaign’s relationship with Russia.
Mr. Browder, who has denied any wrongdoing, and federal prosecutors in the U.S. claim that Russian officials and people linked to Russian officials participated in the fraud against his fund.
Ms. Veselnitskaya says she is a former Moscow regional prosecutor turned private attorney, and represents Prevezon Holdings, a Cyprus-based hotel and real-estate group owned by Russian national Denis Katsyv. Mr. Katsyv’s father, Pytor, is a former top Moscow region official and vice president of state-owned Russian Railways. She says she was compiling information about Mr. Browder on behalf of Prevezon and met with the Trump camp to share her findings.
In 2014, Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, alleged that Prevezon laundered defrauded money from Mr. Browder’s fund into U.S. bank accounts and Manhattan real estate. Earlier this year, U.S. authorities and Prevezon reached a $5.9 million civil settlement. The company didn’t admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement.
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee this week asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions whether the Trump Tower meeting was in any way connected to the settlement, which came two months after President Trump fired Mr. Bharara.
A spokeswoman for the Justice Department didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Ms. Veselnitskaya also said that at the time of the Trump Tower meeting she was representing Aras Agalarov, the Russian-Azerbaijani property developer who organized the 2013 Miss Universe pageant with President Trump in Moscow. However, in email correspondence with Donald Trump Jr., a British publicist presented her as a Russian government lawyer, a description she said was a mischaracterization.
Through the publicist, Mr. Agalarov’s pop-star son Emin helped arrange Ms. Veselnitskaya’s meeting with Donald Trump Jr., one of various people she said she petitioned to assist in her effort to have the law repealed and discredit Mr. Browder.
Rob Goldstone, the British publicist who worked for the Agalarovs, wrote in an email to the president’s son that the elder Mr. Agalarov had met with Russia’s top prosecutor who offered to provide the Trump campaign incriminating information on Mrs. Clinton. Ms. Veselnitskaya says she asked the elder Mr. Agalarov for help in arranging a meeting with the Trump campaign but denies it was about Mrs. Clinton. Both Ms. Veselnitskaya and Mr. Agalarov deny the meeting was arranged at Mr. Chaika’s request.
“Natalia has done some real estate-related legal work for Mr. Agalarov’s company over the years,” said Scott Balber, an attorney representing the Agalarov family. He denied the elder Mr. Agalarov met with Mr. Chaika, the prosecutor general, as described in the email. Mr. Agalarov, speaking on Russian radio Wednesday, called the content of the correspondence “some kind of fiction.”
Asked whether Mr. Chaika requested or participated in arranging Ms. Veselnitskaya’s meeting in New York or met with Mr. Agalarov, the Russian prosecutor general’s office said it “does not exchange information and does not conduct any meetings at the international level outside the framework regulated by international legal agreements and Russian procedural legislation.”
Ms. Veselnitskaya saw the younger Mr. Trump and his colleagues in Trump Tower on June 9 of last year.
“By the time I stepped into the meeting room to talk with Donald Trump Jr., all I knew was that I approached the elder Mr. Agalarov with a request to help,” Ms. Veselnitskaya said. “And I knew his son Emin communicated with Donald Trump Jr.”
She said her meeting wasn’t coordinated with official Russian government structures. She did, however, share information similar to what the Russian prosecutor general’s office gave to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R., Calif.) in a Moscow meeting two months earlier. Namely, she said she wanted to inform the Trump campaign of allegations that an American firm Mr. Browder worked with, Ziff Brothers Investments, had dodged taxes in Russia and later donated to Democrats.
A spokesman for Ziff Brothers Investments declined to comment for this article.
“Both during the meeting, while I was talking to Donald Trump Jr., and in the written materials I prepared, I was trying to tell the story that I myself had personally investigated,” Ms. Veselnitskaya said, referring to Mr. Browder.
Donald Trump Jr. wasn’t satisfied with the quality of the information she provided. In an interview Tuesday with Sean Hannity on Fox News, the younger Mr. Trump said: “It was this, ‘Hey, some DNC donors may have done something in Russia and they didn’t pay taxes.’ I was like, ‘What does this have to do with anything?’”
Ms. Veselnitskaya said: “My expectation before the meeting was he read my letter of information, he got interested, and he was going to help me. His expectations were totally different, as I can understand now.”
Mr. Browder denies the accusations that Ms. Veselnitskaya and the prosecutor general’s office have been leveling against him. He calls them “stale and disproven” and says they’re part of a well-resourced, Moscow-coordinated campaign to undermine him and the Magnitsky Act. The law he helped get passed angered Kremlin authorities in part because it allowed the U.S. to add Russian human-rights violators easily to a U.S. sanctions list, even individuals who had no part in the Magnitsky case.
“They were on a major full-court press on all fronts with Congress, with the press … with Trump Jr.,” Mr. Browder said, describing Ms. Veselnitskaya as a critical part of the anti-Magnitsky Act effort. “I think that she’s working hand in glove with Chaika, and it’s all part of a coordinated strategy back at headquarters.”
The Russian prosecutor general’s office didn’t respond to a request for further comment.
Mr. Putin has called the Magnitsky Act “imperialist behavior” by the U.S. and said Russian authorities believe Mr. Browder himself broke the law. Mr. Putin denied that Russian authorities were criminally negligent in the death of Mr. Magnitsky.
“There was a tragedy,” Mr. Putin said in 2013. “What, in American prisons, no one ever dies or something?”
Mr. Browder filed a complaint with the Justice Department in July 2016 that accused Ms. Veselnitskaya and others of violating U.S. lobbying laws by pushing for a repeal of the Magnitsky Act without registering their activities properly with the Justice Department. He says he hasn’t received a response.
The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee is slated to hold a hearing later this month on violations of the lobbying law, known as the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Mr. Browder is scheduled to testify about the activities of Ms. Veselitskaya and others, the committee announced this week.
Christopher S. Stewart contributed to this article.
Copyright ©2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-lawyer-who-trump-jr-met-says-she-was-in-contact-with-top-russian-prosecutor-1500063809 [with embedded videos, and comments]
*
The Trump Family's Explanations Are Straining Credulity to Its Breaking Point
The story that Donald Trump Jr., his father, and their aides told about a June 9 meeting with a Russian lawyer made little sense—even before the latest revelations.
Jul 14, 2017
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/the-trump-familys-increasingly-implausible-explanations/533682/ [with comments]
Russian-American lobbyist joined Trump’s son’s meeting, too
In this photo taken July 11, 2017, Donald Trump Jr. is interviewed by host Sean Hannity on his Fox News Channel television program, in New York. A Russian-American lobbyist says he attended a June 2016 meeting with President Donald Trump’s son, marking another shift in the account of a discussion that was billed as part of a Russian government effort to help the Republican’s White House campaign.
Jul. 14, 2017
https://www.apnews.com/dceed1008d8f45afb314aca65797762a/Russian-American-lobbyist-joined-Trump's-son's-meeting,-too [with embedded video]
Russian-American at Trump Jr. meeting is ex-military officer
In this photo provided by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Rinat Akhmetshin is photographed at the Newseum in Washington, June 13, 2016 after a documentary screening. Rep. Adam Schiff, ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee says reports that a second Russian person was in a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. last summer “adds another deeply disturbing fact about this secret meeting.” Akhmetshin confirmed his participation to The Associated Press on Friday, July 14, 2017.
Jul. 14, 2017
https://www.apnews.com/135216fe8c2c459993d5f5740bc67c15/Russian-American-at-Trump-Jr.-meeting-is-ex-military-officer
Pop star, lobbyist: The cast of Trump Russia connections
In this file photo taken on Sunday, Nov. 10, 2013, Vice President of Crocus Group Emin Agalarov, left, Miss Universe 2013 Gabriela Isler, from Venezuela, center, and pageant owner Donald Trump, of the United States attend the final of the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, Russia. A billionaire real estate mogul, his pop singer son Emin Agalarov, a music promoter, a property lawyer and Russia’s prosecutor general are unlikely figures who surfaced in emails released by Donald Trump Jr. as his father’s presidential campaign sought potentially damaging information in 2016 from Russia about his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Jul. 14, 2017
https://www.apnews.com/c950bcf920ec4727b1087184b12ac222/Pop-star,-lobbyist:-The-cast-of-Trump-Russia-connections
Also At Trump Jr.-Russia Meeting: An Ex-U.S. Government Worker [translator] With Liberal Views
Investigators won’t say if they’ve spoken to Anatoli Samochornov, a witness to the event everyone is talking about.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/anatoli-samochornov-trump-jr-russia-meeting_us_5966ac00e4b0a8d46d11f69f [with embedded video, and comments]
Trump Tower Russia meeting: At least eight people in the room
July 14, 2017 Updated July 15, 2017
http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/14/politics/donald-trump-jr-meeting/ [with embedded video]
Evidence Suggests Russian Intelligence Pipeline To Trump Campaign
Days after Donald Trump Jr. reportedly received documents aiding his father’s campaign, hackers linked to Russian intelligence released similar material.
07/14/2017
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-jr-russian-intelligence_us_5969356ee4b0d6341fe8f28f [with embedded video, and comments]
‘Lie after lie after lie’: Fox News’s Shepard Smith has a Cronkite moment on Russia
July 14, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/14/lie-after-lie-after-lie-fox-news-shepard-smith-has-a-cronkite-moment-on-russia/ [with embedded video, and (over 5,000) comments], [unofficial upload of the segment for the moment at least at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5LftyJmNtA (with comments)] [no official upload of the segment (yet) at https://www.youtube.com/user/FoxNewsChannel/videos ]
Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting sure sounds like a Russian intelligence operation
Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya fits the profile of someone who might serve as a “cut-out” or “access agent” sent to assess and test a high-priority target’s interest in cooperation.
By Rolf Mowatt-Larssen
Rolf Mowatt-Larssen is the director of the Intelligence and Defense Project at Harvard’s Belfer Center. He served for three years as director of intelligence and counterintelligence at the Department of Energy and for 23 years as a CIA intelligence officer in domestic and international posts.
July 14, 2017
Donald Trump Jr. is seeking to write off as a nonevent his meeting last year with a Russian lawyer who was said to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton. “It was such a nothing,” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity [ http://www.foxnews.com/transcript/2017/07/11/donald-trump-jr-on-hannity-in-retrospect-wouldve-done-things-differently.html ] on Tuesday. “There was nothing to tell.”
But everything we know about the meeting — from whom it involved to how it was set up to how it unfolded — is in line with what intelligence analysts would expect an overture in a Russian influence operation to look like. It bears all the hallmarks of a professionally planned, carefully orchestrated intelligence soft pitch designed to gauge receptivity, while leaving room for plausible deniability in case the approach is rejected. And the Trump campaign’s willingness to take the meeting — and, more important, its failure to report the episode to U.S. authorities — may have been exactly the green light Russia was looking for to launch a more aggressive phase of intervention in the U.S. election.
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trump-jrs-russia-meeting-sure-sounds-like-a-russian-intelligence-operation/2017/07/14/5f7f3dfe-6762-11e7-9928-22d00a47778f_story.html [with embedded video, and comments]
Trump 2020 Campaign Paid $50,000 To Trump Jr.’s Lawyer Days Before Bombshell NYT Report
According to the disclosure forms, Trump’s presidential campaign gave the payment to Futerfas’ law firm more than a week before the story ran.
07/15/2017 Updated July 15, 2017
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-campaign-paid-retainer-to-trump-jrs-lawyer-eleven-days-before-bombshell-nyt-story_us_596a9a68e4b017418627f6eb [with embedded video, and comments]
Trump Goes on Attack as Russia Revelations Appear to Take Toll
President Trump on Saturday at Trump National Golf Club during the United States Women’s Open in Bedminster, N.J.
JULY 16, 2017
BEDMINSTER, N.J. — President Trump unleashed a new fusillade of tweets on Sunday morning, defending his son Donald Trump Jr., slashing the news media and tarring his long-vanquished opponent, Hillary Clinton.
After a leisurely Saturday afternoon spent at a women’s golf tournament at his club here, where he waved to the crowd from a glassed-in viewing stand, Mr. Trump awoke with a familiar list of grievances.
“HillaryClinton can illegally get the questions to the Debate & delete 33,000 emails but my son Don is being scorned by the Fake News media?” he tweeted [ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/886534810575020032 ] shortly before 7 a.m. Forty minutes later, he posted [ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/886544734788997125 ], “With all of its phony unnamed sources & highly slanted & even fraudulent reporting, #Fake News is DISTORTING DEMOCRACY in our country.”
In between those posts, Mr. Trump thanked people who had turned out to cheer him at the United States Women’s Open, which is being played at Trump National Golf Club despite calls from women’s groups for it to be moved because of his record of degrading behavior toward women.
A small knot of protesters formed Saturday afternoon as well, but the police kept them well away from the club. “Thank you to all of the supporters, who far out-numbered the protesters, yesterday at the Women’s U.S. Open,” Mr. Trump wrote [ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/886538703547621376 ]. “Very cool!”
Mr. Trump has gone through one of the rockiest stretches of his presidency since the disclosure of a meeting in June 2016 [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/us/politics/donald-trump-jr-russia-email-candidacy.html ] between his son and a Kremlin-linked lawyer. Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, also attended, as did a Russian-American lobbyist, Rinat Akhmetshin [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/14/us/politics/russian-american-lobbyist-meeting-trump.html ].
Besieged by the headlines about Russia and Mr. Trump’s eldest son, the White House planned to repackage the president’s economic message with a string of “theme weeks.” The first, this week, will be “Made in America,” focusing attention on American workers and goods they produce.
[...]
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/16/us/politics/trump-twitter-russia.html
No, Donald Trump Jr. Doesn’t Have a First Amendment Right to Get Freebies From the Russians
July 16, 2017
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/knocking-down-best-argument-in-defense-of-trump-jr.html [with comments]
Trump's lawyer let something slip about the Russia meeting that raises questions about whether Trump attended
Jul. 16, 2017
President Donald Trump's lawyer told ABC on Sunday morning [ http://www.businessinsider.com/jay-sekulow-secret-service-donald-trump-jr-2017-7 ] that Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting last June with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin was innocent because if it weren't, the Secret Service would not have "allowed these people in."
"I wonder why the Secret Service — if this was nefarious — why the Secret Service allowed these people in?" Sekulow told ABC's Jon Karl. "The president had Secret Service protection at that point, and that raised a question with me."
It is unclear why Sekulow assumed the Secret Service vetted people Trump Jr. met with. The Secret Service confirmed on Sunday [ https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/886674470118752256 ] that Trump Jr. was not under its protection on June 9, 2016, and "would not have screened anyone he [Trump Jr.] was meeting with at that time." Trump's campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner were not under Secret Service protection at that point, either, as Think Progress noted on Sunday.
The Secret Service would not have had to do a background check on the attendees beforehand since Trump was just a candidate at the time, former Secret Service agent Jonathan Wackrow told CNN on Sunday — only a physical sreening.
Indeed, Akhmetshin told Yahoo that "no one asked us for ID's" when he and Veselnitskaya entered Trump Tower. "We literally walked in," he said. He told the Washington Post in an earlier interview that Veselnitskaya only invited him to the meeting the day of.
Sekulow's comments about the Secret Service garnered widespread attention, and raised questions about whether Trump himself was present at the meeting he claimed to only have learned about last week. Emails released by Trump Jr. last Tuesday revealed he was offered dirt on Hillary Clinton by a "Russian government attorney" who wanted to meet with him to discuss it further. Trump Jr. agreed to the meeting, replying, "I love it."
According to media reports from that time, Trump was at Trump Tower at 4 p.m. while the meeting was taking place in his son's office. The only public event the then-candidate attended that day was a fundraising lunch for the Trump Victory Fund, CNN reported, and he was back at Trump Tower by 1 p.m.
[...
http://www.businessinsider.com/trumps-lawyer-jay-sekulow-russia-meeting-2017-7
Team Trump Excuses for the Don Jr. Meeting Go From Bad to Worse
The explanations and defenses have continued to change—and not for the better.
07.16.17
http://www.thedailybeast.com/team-trump-excuses-for-the-don-jr-meeting-go-from-bad-to-worse
A Russian Developer Helps Out the Kremlin on Occasion. Was He a Conduit to Trump?
Shortly before the Miss Universe pageant in 2013, President Vladimir V. Putin presented Mr. Agalarov with the Order of Honor, one of Russia’s highest civilian awards.
JULY 16, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/16/world/europe/aras-agalarov-trump-kremlin.html
*
and a flashback for a bit of compare and contrast:
THE 2000 CAMPAIGN: THE DEBATE; Gore Aide Receives, Then Lets Go Of Hot Potato
SEPT. 14, 2000
A close adviser to Vice President Al Gore said he had received an anonymously mailed package today that involved material designed to prepare Gov. George W. Bush for his debates with Mr. Gore.
The adviser, former Representative Tom Downey of Long Island, N.Y., said he examined the materials briefly before giving them to his lawyer, who turned them over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation this afternoon. Mr. Downey, who has been helping Mr. Gore prepare for the Bush debates and was standing in for Mr. Bush in mock debates, also said he would recuse himself from any further debate preparation.
The Bush and Gore campaigns are to meet on Thursday to negotiate the debate schedule. If the candidates adhere to a plan set up by a bipartisan commission, the first debate will be on Oct. 3 in Boston.
Campaign officials said they did not know if the materials sent to Mr. Downey had been stolen from the Bush campaign or were meant to trap the Gore adviser in some sort of dirty trick. Mr. Downey's lawyer, Marc Miller, said the material -- a videotape and a sheaf of papers -- arrived in an envelope postmarked Austin, Tex., where the Bush campaign has its headquarters.
The Gore campaign was eager to dissociate itself quickly from the incident. After Mr. Miller called the F.B.I., campaign officials alerted The Associated Press that the packet had arrived and provided a detailed time line of Mr. Downey's actions.
Mark Fabiani, a spokesman for Mr. Gore, said of Mr. Downey: ''He's being very careful and very prudent. He's handled this exactly right. No one can raise any questions about how it's being handled. What to make of it, I don't know.''
[...]
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/14/us/the-2000-campaign-the-debate-gore-aide-receives-then-lets-go-of-hot-potato.html
--
this is part 4 of a 10-part post which proceeds (point arising on the given) day by (point arising on the given) day from July 5, 2017 through July 14, 2017 -- the preceding part is the post to which this is a reply; the next part is a reply to this post -- the following 'see also (linked in)' listing, updated for intervening posts along the way, is common to all 10 parts
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in addition to (linked in) the post to which this is a reply and preceding and (any future other) following, see also (linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=3967329 and preceding and following;
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AM Joy
7/8/17
Donald Trump appeared to accept Putin’s explanation regarding interference in our election over reports from U.S. intelligence agencies during their G-20 meeting. [With Malcolm Nance.] Duration: 16:18
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-news/watch/trump-meeting-with-putin-sparks-controversy-987631683708 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAtKjlzVxiw [with comments]
*
Trump and Chinese president discuss North Korea
AM Joy
7/8/17
Donald Trump met with China's president as the G-20 summit in Germany wrapped up. At the top of the agenda: North Korea and their intercontinental ballistic missile test. [With Malcolm Nance.] Duration: 8:35
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-news/watch/trump-and-chinese-president-discuss-north-korea-987640387929
*
GOP senators return home to backlash against healthcare bill
AM Joy
7/8/17
During the holiday weekend, many Republican senators faced opposition from constituents, the majority of whom reportedly strongly oppose the Senate healthcare bill. Duration: 9:27
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-news/watch/gop-senators-return-home-to-backlash-against-healthcare-bill-987649091990 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIufnvbfMFk [with comments]
*
Trump’s second overseas trip may isolate U.S.
AM Joy
7/8/17
In his speech in Poland, many felt the president suggested that the future of Western civilization might be under threat due to immigration and other issues important to many countries at the summit. [With Malcolm Nance.] Duration: 15:35
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-news/watch/trump-s-second-overseas-trip-may-isolate-u-s-987662915581 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtPkq-QGekQ [with comments]
*
Federal budget crisis looms closer
AM Joy
7/8/17
Former labor secretary nominee Andrew Puzder joins AM Joy to discuss the debt ceiling crisis that could lead to a government shutdown, if Congress does not intervene in just a few weeks. Duration: 7:02
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-news/watch/federal-budget-crisis-looms-closer-987670595708
*
States reject White House demand for voter information
AM Joy
7/8/17
In an unprecedented show of bipartisan effort, 48 states have refused to give private voter data to Donald Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Duration: 11:46
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-news/watch/states-reject-white-house-demand-for-voter-information-987677251842 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL_8RYrKBiY [with comments]
--
Xi, Trump Meet on Ties, Hot-spot Issues on G20 Sidelines
Published on Jul 8, 2017 by CCTV+ [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmv5DbNpxH8X2eQxJBqEjKQ , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmv5DbNpxH8X2eQxJBqEjKQ/videos ]
Chinese President Xi Jinping and his U.S. counterpart, Donald Trump, met in Hamburg, Germany Saturday to discuss bilateral ties and global hot-spot issues on the sidelines of a Group of 20 (G20) summit.
http://www.cctvplus.com/news/20170709/8055175.shtml
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPcQXN8FHiM [with comments]
*
China's Xi urges joint efforts to keep China-U.S. ties on track: Xinhua
U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) shake hands prior to a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany, July 8, 2017.
July 8, 2017
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-g20-germany-usa-china-ties-idUSKBN19T0VG
Quiet success for China at G20 as Xi avoids drama and spotlight
July 10, 2017
BEIJING (Reuters) - From U.S. anger over inaction on North Korea to a festering border dispute with India and the ailing Chinese Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, last week's G20 summit was strewn with minefields for China's President Xi Jinping.
By chance or by strategy, Xi and his officials picked their way through unscathed.
Beijing is ultra-sensitive about Xi's image and ensuring he gets the respect it sees as his due as leader of an emerging superpower, especially when traveling to Western countries where it cannot so tightly control the public narrative.
Diplomatic sources in Beijing, speaking ahead of Xi's trip to the G20 gathering in the German city of Hamburg, said Chinese officials had in private expressed nervousness that he could be asked awkward questions about North Korea, or the cancer-struck Liu, jailed for 11 years in 2009 for "inciting subversion of state power".
In the end it was U.S. President Donald Trump's meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, amid accusations Russia interfered in the U.S. election, and Trump's refusal to return to the Paris climate agreement that dominated the limelight.
Xi, by contrast, avoided controversy in his bilateral meetings and reaffirmed China's commitment to the Paris deal and to an open global economy, in what the official China Daily called the "burnishing of (his) reputation".
"Nobody talked about the South China Sea. No one talked about trade. Everyone was happy with Xi. I think he played this well," said Ulrich Speck, senior fellow at the Elcano Royal Institute in Brussels.
"All eyes were on Trump and Putin. But the fact that there was no U.S.-China clash was at least as important. Xi stayed out of the alpha-male fight. China presented itself as a partner to Europe."
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Xi "made it clear that the G20 should adhere to taking the path of open development and mutual benefit leading to all-win results, support a multilateral trade mechanism, and promote international trade and investment".
"China was in a good place at G20, with reasonable policies," said Jin Canrong of the School of International Studies at the Renmin University of China, who has advised the government on diplomatic matters.
"So President Xi was comfortable and positive there."
Don't Mention Taiwan
Potentially the biggest test was Xi's meeting with Trump, who in the run-up to Hamburg had voiced frustration over China's inability to rein in its troublesome erstwhile ally, North Korea.
In the event, Trump returned to the conciliatory tone struck at their first meeting in April, telling the Chinese leader it was "an honor to have you as a friend" and he appreciated actions Xi had already taken to try to dissuade North Korea from pursuing nuclear weapons.
Influential Chinese state-run tabloid the Global Times said in an editorial on Monday that the Xi-Trump meeting had defied "the naysayers in the West".
"Beijing and Washington saw friction on issues including Taiwan and the South China Sea ahead of the meeting, and there was speculation from Western public opinion that the China-U.S. 'honeymoon' had come to an end. But the Xi-Trump meeting repudiates such speculation," the paper said.
Speaking to reporters later on Air Force One, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the Trump-Xi meeting lasted more than an hour-and-a-half, and would have gone on longer had they not had to leave for other engagements.
Ruan Zongze, a former Chinese diplomat now with the China Institute of International Studies, a think-tank affiliated with the Foreign Ministry, said Xi was much more upbeat than when he spoke to Trump a few days ahead of G20 and mentioned certain unnamed "negative factors" in their relationship.
"Even on trade Trump underscored that he wants cooperation," Ruan said.
[...]
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-g20-germany-trump-xi-idUSKBN19V1LF
*
U.S. Prepares to Act Alone Against North Korea
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un celebrated the test-fire of an intercontinental ballistic missile on July at an undisclosed location.
Officials consider unilateral moves to tighten sanctions to halt nuclear program
July 10, 2017 Updated July 10, 2017
WASHINGTON—The Trump administration is moving toward unilaterally tightening sanctions on North Korea, targeting Chinese companies [ https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-global-web-that-keeps-north-korea-running-1499358538 ] and banks the U.S. says are funneling cash into Pyongyang’s weapons program.
Sharper rhetoric [ https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-practice-attack-capabilities-with-south-korea-1499486950 ] from high-ranking U.S. officials since North Korea’s July 4 ballistic missile test and recently unsealed court filings offer clues that the White House is ready to use its own powers to constrict the flow of cash to Kim Jung Un’s regime. U.S. officials have expressed a preference for collective action through the United Nations and support from China.
The Justice Department, in a federal-court case that was partly unsealed last week, pointed to “offshore U.S. dollar accounts” associated with a network of five companies linked to Chinese national Chi Yupeng. That included one of the largest importers of North Korean goods into China, Dandong Zhicheng Metallic Material Co.
Citing sources that included two North Korean defectors, the Justice Department said the so-called Chi Yupeng network hid transactions which helped finance North Korea’s military and arms programs.
That network isn’t under U.S. sanctions but analysts say it is a vital source of funds that can be choked off, in the same way the U.S. targeted another Chinese firm late last year, Dandong Hongxiang Industrial Development Co. Ltd. Some of the nearly two dozen Chinese banks that handled allegedly laundered money from Dangdong Hongxiang also could be targeted, analysts said. The company declined to comment at the time.
China’s Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to a request to comment and Mr. Chi and Dandong Zhicheng couldn’t be reached.
North Korea has resisted pressure for years and many experts question whether this time would be any different. Pyongyang has become proficient at evading sanctions, U.S. officials say, including by disguising its international trade and financial entities through firms in China.
The U.S. itself has almost no direct ties to North Korea after imposing wide-ranging bilateral sanctions in response to previous missile and nuclear tests.
China, North Korea’s chief trade partner, has resisted tightening the screws against its neighbor, concerned that it could provoke Pyongyang to lash out against America’s allies in the region or precipitate a collapse of the regime that sparks a flood of refugees, analysts say. The status quo has also provided China a buffer against U.S. power in Asia.
Since raising the pressure on North Korea requires targeting more Chinese firms, unilateral action risks fueling already strained tensions between Washington and Beijing. It could complicate Washington’s efforts to expand access for U.S. companies into the world’s most populous country and win Beijing’s support on other international issues, such as on cyber security and resolving conflicts in the Middle East.
[...]
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-prepares-to-act-alone-against-north-korea-1499707831 [with comments]
Trump flew a pair of bombers over the South China Sea to annoy China
Jul 7, 2017
https://news.vice.com/story/trump-flew-a-pair-of-bombers-over-the-south-china-sea-to-annoy-china
U.S. B-1B Bomber Flights Demonstrate Commitment to South Korea
U.S. Air Force B-1B Lancers assigned to the 9th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron, deployed from Dyess Air Force Base, Texas, fly with South Korean F-15 and U.S. Air Force F-16 fighter jets over the Korean Peninsula, July 7, 2017. The Lancers departed Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, to conduct a sequenced bilateral mission with South Korean F-15s and Japan Air Self-Defense Force F-2 fighter jets.
July 8, 2017
https://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/1241239/us-b-1b-bomber-flights-demonstrate-commitment-to-south-korea/
East China Sea Mission Marks New B-1B Bomber Milestone
A U.S. Air Force B-1B Lancer assigned to the 9th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron deployed from Dyess Air Force Base, Texas, takes off from Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, to fly a bilateral mission with Japanese fighter jets over the East China Sea, July 6, 2017. The mission marked the first time U.S. Pacific Command B-1B Lancers have conducted combined training with Japanese fighters at night.
July 10, 2017
https://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/1241867/east-china-sea-mission-marks-new-b-1b-bomber-milestone/
The Trump White House keeps mixing up and botching] the names of Asian [and other] countries and their leaders’ [names and] titles
July 10, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/08/white-house-press-office-misidentifies-japanese-prime-minister-abe-as-president/ [with embedded video, and comments]
Diplomats: US drafts new sanctions resolution against NKorea
In this Saturday, July 8, 2017, file photo, U.S. President Donald Trump, left, and Chinese President Xi Jinping arrive for a meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany. The United States apologized for mistakenly describing Xi as the leader of Taiwan, China said Monday, July 10, 2017. Chinese scholars said the mistake shows a lack of competence in the White House that is not conducive to healthy U.S.-China relations.
Jul. 10, 2017
https://www.apnews.com/37497f7673c94a4885289f15f59234d2/Diplomats:-US-drafts-new-sanctions-resolution-against-NKorea
U.S. aims for U.N. vote on North Korea sanctions within weeks - diplomats
July 10, 2017
http://in.reuters.com/article/northkorea-missile-un-idINKBN19V28T
Russia submits North Korea missile data to U.N.
A handout photo made available by the official North Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) allegedly shows the North Korean inter-continental ballistic rocket Hwasong-14 being prepared before a test launch on July 4. Moscow claims the projectile is a midrange missile.
July 10, 2017
July 10 (UPI) -- Russia has submitted documents proving the North Korea projectile launched last week was an intermediate-range missile.
Russia's state-run Tass news agency reported the proof was submitted to the United Nations secretariat and contradicts U.S. and South Korea findings that show the Hwasong-14 rocket is an intercontinental ballistic missile, capable of reaching the U.S. mainland.
According to Tass, the Russian documents submitted to the United Nations on Saturday stated the Voronezh radar base in Irkutsk, Russia, tracked the launched of a North Korea midrange ballistic missile on July 4.
Missile flight time was 14 minutes, the maximum altitude reached was 332 miles and flight distance was 317 miles, Russia stated.
Based on the data, the Hwasong-14 is a midrange missile that can hit targets within a 1,240-mile range.
Russia's proof includes a map of the missile flight path.
The move comes after Russia's deputy U.N. Ambassador Vladimir Safronkov said at the U.N. Security Council Moscow's data indicate North Korea launched a midrange projectile, and not an ICBM.
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley challenged the claim.
"Not only has the secretary-general said this was an ICBM and the United States has said this is an ICBM. North Korea has said this is an ICBM. So if you need any sort of intelligence to let you know that the rest of the world sees this as an ICBM, I'm happy to provide it," Haley said.
Russia blocked a U.N. statement urging North Korea sanctions.
The report also calls into question North Korea claims. Pyongyang stated last week the Hwasong-14 flew 580 miles at a maximum altitude of 1,740 miles, and claimed the launch was a "successful" demonstration of ICBM capability.
The claim, if true, means the Hwasong-14's range exceeds 4,900 miles if fired from a normal angle.
ICBMs must have a minimum range of 3,400 miles.
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2017/07/10/Russia-submits-North-Korea-missile-data-to-UN/8811499691892/ [with comments]
US Preps for THAAD Missile Test Against IRBM As North Korean Threat Rises
Long-planned experiment comes amid calls from U.S. officials to broadly expand America's missile defense apparatus.
July 10, 2017
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/12309/us-preps-for-thaad-missile-test-against-irbm-as-north-korean-threat-rises [with embedded videos]
Thaad test set to ratchet up tensions in Korean peninsula
Trump could soon be facing his first major foreign policy crisis, which may require him to make some big decisions on how to tackle Pyongyang.
July 11, 2017
http://www.businesstimes.com.sg/opinion/thaad-test-set-to-ratchet-up-tensions-in-korean-peninsula
U.S. Shoots Down Target in THAAD Anti-Missile Test
The U.S. successfully launches a THAAD interceptor.
The simulation was the first of its kind to successfully hit an intermediate-range ballistic missile.
Jul 11, 2017
The U.S. military conducted a successful test of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile system on Tuesday by shooting down a simulated intermediate-range ballistic missile over the Pacific Ocean. The test signals an improvement in the defense system, which before Tuesday had only intercepted shorter-range missiles. While the simulation was planned for months, it comes amid a growing international threat from North Korea, which tested [ https://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2017/07/north-korea-fires-ballistic-missile-into-sea-of-japan/532638/ ] its first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on July 4.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency released a statement claiming that the latest test “bolsters the country’s defensive capability against developing missile threats in North Korea and other countries around the globe.” North Korea is widely believed to be developing an ICBM capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. Experts say [ http://putting%20u.s.%20cities%20within%20striking%20distance/ ] the nation’s latest tests puts Alaska within striking distance, but is not yet capable of reaching the lower 48 states.
Tuesday’s test was carried out in Kodiak, Alaska, and shot down a ballistic missile target from an aircraft flying north of Hawaii. The simulation adds to a perfect track record of THAAD missile launches since the U.S. resumed testing in 2005. Thus far, THAAD has proven more successful than the nation’s Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, which is designed to target an ICBM. Even after a successful test launch [ https://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2017/05/us-conducts-successful-missile-defense-test/528591/ ] in May, the GMD system has only achieved a 55 percent success rate. While the Pentagon previously reported that the system has a “limited capability to defend the U.S. homeland,” they have since claimed [ http://www.nydailynews.com/newswires/news/national/pentagon-upgrades-assessment-ability-defend-icbms-article-1.3229897 ] that the U.S. is capable of defending itself against a small number of ICBMs.
Unlike the GMD system, the THAAD system is designed to counter short, medium, and intermediate range missile threats. In June, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency announced plans to deliver an additional 52 THAAD interceptors to the U.S. Army between October 2017 and September 2018. The nation has also deployed the system in South Korea and Guam—areas that both contain U.S. military bases. The deployment of THAAD in South Korea has sparked criticism from nations like Russia and China, who accuse the U.S. of attempting to expand its military authority in Asia. North Korea has also called for an end [ https://kcnawatch.co/newstream/1493836333-970228373/consequences-of-thaad-deployment-will-be-miserable-kcna-commentary/ ] to the program, which it considers a threat to regional stability.
[...]
https://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2017/07/us-conducts-successful-thaad-missile-test/533310/ [with comments]
The US’s best defense against a North Korean nuke could spark a nuclear war with Russia
Jul. 10, 2017
The US has spent at least $40 billion [ http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-missile-defense-test-20170530-story.html ] on a missile defense system intended to knock down or deter incoming North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles, but actually using the system could lead to an accidental nuclear war with Russia, according to an expert.
Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of Arms Control Wonk, took to Twitter [ https://twitter.com/ArmsControlWonk/status/883459440208297984 ] to detail how the US could find itself exchanging nuclear salvos with Russia if it ever tried to shoot down an incoming North Korean ballistic missile.
The US's Missile Defense Agency, which operates the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) missile shield, told Business Insider in May [ http://www.businessinsider.com/us-icbm-intercept-gmd-north-korea-decoy-salvo-2017-5 ] that in the event of a real incoming threat, they would launch several interceptors to increase the chances of knocking out the missile.
Lewis pegs this figure at about four or five interceptors.
But only one interceptor missile could hit the threat. The others would continue streaking through the high atmosphere towards Russia and China.
The problem is that, in that moment, while US missile defense forces are praying their interceptor hits North Korea's nuclear missile, they're also relying on Russia to be able to tell that the other interceptor missiles aren't a salvo of US nukes.
There's plenty of reason to believe Russia can't do that.
[...]
http://www.businessinsider.com/us-intercept-north-korea-icbm-nuclear-war-russia-2017-7
North Korea's Secret Weapon is Terrible Synth Pop
The Moranbong Band.
Jul 10 2017
Pyongyang, 6 AM. The eerie stillness of the morning is shattered as loudspeakers across the city crack to life with the jarring, dissonant synth tones of "Where Are You, Dear General?" as performed by North Korea's state-sanctioned propaganda orchestra, the Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble. Every day, most of Pyongyang's 2.5 million residents begin their day to the recording blaring into their bedrooms. The song serves as a mandatory alarm for a people bombarded with propaganda through film, art, television, music, and radio, at every juncture of their day.
Since the installation of the Kim regime's "Monolithic Ideological System" in 1967, all music in The Hermit Kingdom—be it military, patriotic, folk, orchestral, pop—has been produced by the government at the behest of the Supreme Leader. All outside music is strictly prohibited and non-sanctioned indigenous North Korean music has been wiped out. State-produced music plays a ubiquitous role in the daily lives of North Koreans, and the regime's totalitarian grasp over its production and consumption represents the most effective manifestation of soft power in practice anywhere on the planet.
"There's music everywhere in North Korea: in the workplace, at home, in the streets," says Darren Zook, a professor of political science at UC Berkeley. "North Korean television—which is all state propaganda—doesn't broadcast all day. In periods where there is nothing on, they play propaganda music, continuously, for hours on end. It's considered the duty of a citizen to have their TV on all day so they're hearing that music, just so in the background they are reminded of the presence of the state. It's behavioral conditioning; the eternal reminder that the state is watching."
The music popularized during any period in the country is a reflection of the Kim in power at that time. In the 1970s and 80s, Kim Il Sung preferred staid folk music and orchestral arrangements that glorified Korean history and socialist workers of the world. In the 1990s, Kim Jong -i's paranoid, wonky perspective on modernism shone through in the attempts at outdated synth pop of the Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble, whose tracks have names like "Excellent Horse-Like Lady" and "Song For Tankman." Recently, Kim Jong-un's attempts at replicating the success of South Korean K-Pop have resulted in The Moranbong Band, a 21-piece, all-female NK-pop extravaganza. "None of it's good," laughs Zook, reflecting on the timeline. "It's all bleeding from the ears bad."
[...]
[...]
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7x9x8d/north-koreas-secret-weapon-is-terrible-synth-pop , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVXSgKYBoE8 [as embedded; with comments], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5tkXgw2OMY [as embedded; with comments], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeKrHSQgN00 [embedded; with comments]
*
Trump talking nonsense as Xi, Putin play him
Paul Kelly
12:00AM July 10, 2017
The G20 meeting in Germany has been dismal, disappointing and divisive — an ominous warning of an ineffective America, the retreat of global collaboration and the rise of “nation-first” policies that guarantee more disorder and risk greater military conflict.
The big themes [ http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/turnbull-tells-china-to-rein-in-regime/news-story/8ef66f2e7ec8b3fe6cea1d166cdda70a ] are the sharp decline in American global leadership under Donald Trump creating a power vacuum, the fracture between America and Europe that cripples the moral and political standing of the West, and the opportunistic exploitation of US weakness by the dictators in China and Russia as they feel the times suit them.
The triumphant boasts of Trump that the G20 meeting was a “wonderful success” are a pathetic nonsense. Trump left Germany having gained next to nothing on North Korea and having tried next to nothing.
Trump’s supposed friends, the Europeans, publicise their distaste bordering on contempt for him. After giving the US concessions in the communique, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the disagreements had to be made clear and deplored Trump’s quitting the climate-change agreement. French President Emmanuel Macron said: “Our world has never been so divided. Centrifugal forces have never been so powerful. Our common goods have never been so threatened.”
The double takeout from this meeting is that Trump’s “America first” template will shatter US influence and authority — and on this brand of politics he will be outclassed by President Xi Jinping’s “China-first” and President Vladimir Putin’s “Russia-first” ingrained strategies. They are professionals at this game while Trump is the amateur.
The meeting reveals an America seemingly devoid of any coherent strategy to handle the world’s pivotal problems — Trump, riven with contradictions, seems to grasp he must enlist other nations but seems incapable of doing so.
It is the confidence with which China and Russia manage him that is alarming.
On North Korea Trump is left with the logic yet futility of putting pressure on China to bring Kim Jong-un to major concessions while the Chinese — on whom North Korean economic survival depends — refuse for their own geo-strategic reasons. Before the G20 meeting China and Russia jointly called on North Korea to halt missile tests and for the US to abandon a missile shield and military exercises with South Korea. Their message: the US needs to back off.
The Russians have every reason to be pleased. They came to the G20 with a strategy to create a working dialogue with Trump and they got it. Trump called his first meeting with Putin “tremendous”. Putin’s lust is for the US President to treat him as a power equal — and he may have got that.
The limited ceasefire they agreed on Syria suits Putin. After the meeting he called the Syrian deal “a massive step forward”. Putin knows his Trump and played the flattery card: “Trump’s TV persona differs sharply from the real man,” Putin purred. “He is a very straightforward person.” Hail Putin, defender of Trump to his critics.
“As for relations on a personal level, I believe we have established them,” Putin said. Trump seems to concur. They disagreed on whether Trump accepted Putin’s denial of illegal intervention in the US election — but the Russians have probably succeeded in stirring up more trouble for Trump on this issue back home.
Trump’s much-hailed Warsaw speech was a magnificent tribute to the Poles and a ringing defence of Western civilisation, but one speech cannot redeem a failed polity. That Trump waited till he got an adoring audience in Warsaw before making an unequivocal declaration of support for NATO betrays his unreliability.
He said it in Warsaw but refused to say it in Brussels. Does he have a different NATO policy depending where he is? Recall that in Brussels standing before a 9/11 memorial, Trump, in a despicable effort, declined to pledge to the NATO mutual defence principle. This is a president who thinks creating angst, antagonising allies and switching position is clever.
At the G20 Trump said other countries were largely to blame for the US trade deficit with individual nations. It is his pet obsession. The White House threatens to restrict steel imports and is targeting China. The G20 said it would address Trump’s concerns. But the ultimate message from other leaders was defiance — they told Trump if he went protectionist they would retaliate.
Trump won concessions in the communique for his position on trade. But his claim of victimhood is a sad rejection of longstanding US declaratory support for free trade. The macabre joke is that Xi and Putin now pose as apostles of open trade.
On climate change it was formalised: 19 against one. Merkel, despite her responsibility as host, did not conceal her dismay and said she was “gratified to note that the other 19 members of the G20 feel the Paris Agreement is irreversible”.
On both trade and climate change Malcolm Turnbull was with the majority against Trump. He would not be so inept to frame the differences this way but that is the reality. Indeed, under Turnbull, ties with Germany and France have reached a zenith, another reminder that Australia runs a global foreign policy.
Optimists suggest that Trump is evolving into a type of Reaganite president. That would be wonderful news but is surely too ambitious. Small mercies would do — mere coherence and consistency would constitute a breakthrough event for America and the world.
Trump seemed to enjoy himself at the G20 and lavished praise everywhere at its conclusion. Yet he has no time for the global institutions and his instincts rebel against a multilateral approach to global challenges. Every report from the meeting suggests Trump was inept in this forum. That would be tolerable if he had an alternative strategy based upon an intelligent national-interest driven realpolitik. But he doesn’t.
Trump prides himself as a deal-making transactional leader but his opponents at this level, Xi and Putin, are in a class he has never previously encountered despite their running countries that lack equivalent power to the US.
Australia needs the G20 to work and thrive. This is the vital summit where we sit at the head table, a place Australia has never previously occupied. Turnbull went with an initiative on better control of tech companies to curb use of the internet on behalf of terrorists and progress was made on that front.
But the overall task facing Turnbull is extremely difficult. The international system is being battered by a challenging combination of technological, strategic and political disruptions. Australia needs to remain constructive, shore up its defences and maximise its coalitions of shared interest.
Copyright The Australian
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/trump-talking-nonsense-as-xi-and-putin-play-for-keeps/news-story/63eb25104ef668721a89e9c633832905 [with comments]
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China’s only Nobel Peace Prize winner died in state custody. Hours later, Trump praised Xi Jinping.
A pro-democracy activist mourns the death of Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo outside China's Liaison Office in Hong Kong on July 13.
July 14, 2017
Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo died Thursday [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinese-nobel-laureate-liu-xiaobo-called-a-monument-to-morality/2017/07/13/bde11b7a-6770-11e7-83d7-7a628c56bde7_story.html ] at age 61. Liu was one of his country's best-known dissidents and became the only Chinese national to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. But his activism against one-party rule came at a huge personal cost: When he won the Nobel, he was in the middle of a lengthy prison sentence for his promotion of democracy.
Liu was granted medical parole in late June as the Chinese government revealed that he had late-stage liver cancer, but he died under the close guard of authorities. He is the first Nobel Peace Prize winner to die in state custody since 1938, when German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky died after years in Nazi Germany's concentration camps.
The circumstances of Liu's death drew commiseration from around the world. However, the response from the leader of the United States was comparatively muted. The White House released a short statement Thursday that said President Trump was “deeply saddened” by the news of Liu's death, noting that he was a “poet, scholar and courageous advocate” who had “dedicated his life to the pursuit of democracy and liberty.”
Many activists said that the White House statement was undercut by comments Trump himself made earlier in the day. The president had been holding a news conference in Paris with French President Emmanuel Macron when a reporter asked him what he thought personally of Xi Jinping, the Chinese president.
“Well, he’s a friend of mine,” Trump responded [ https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/07/13/remarks-president-trump-and-president-macron-france-joint-press ]. “I have great respect for him. We’ve gotten to know each other very well. A great leader. He’s a very talented man. I think he’s a very good man. He loves China, I can tell you. He loves China. He wants to do what’s right for China.”
Xi has been leader of China since 2013 and oversaw the country during four years of Liu's detention. Activists say that under Xi, the Chinese state has grown more repressive and activists more threatened.
“The future for human rights in China gets ever bleaker under the leadership of President Xi Jinping,” Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, said this year [ https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/01/12/china-deepening-assault-human-rights ]. “The authorities have targeted rights-promoting groups and boldly strengthened efforts to control them.”
Though Trump has frequently criticized China for its trade policies and economic relationship with North Korea, he has shied away from commenting on human rights abuses in the country. The U.S. president has met with Xi a number of times and spoken warmly of his personal relationship with him on a number of occasions.
Trump's praise for Xi is disappointing to many Chinese activists.
“Trump has shown so little interest in human rights since he came to power, and sometimes he even shows contempt for human rights issues,” Hu Jia, a prominent Chinese dissident and Liu family friend, told the Guardian [ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/14/death-of-liu-xiaobo-activists-scorn-trump-for-hailing-terrific-xi ] newspaper.
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/07/14/chinas-only-nobel-peace-prize-winner-died-in-state-custody-hours-later-trump-praised-xi-jinping/ [with comments]
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Trump left in cold over Paris climate agreement at end of G20 summit
Donald Trump and Angela Merkel attend a panel discussion on the second day of the G20 summit in Hamburg on Saturday.
All other world leaders sign declaration that deal is irreversible after US withdrawal sparks standoff in Hamburg
8 July 2017
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/08/donald-trump-paris-climate-agreement-g20-summit-us-theresa-may [with embedded video]
Climate at the G20: Six Degrees of U.S. Isolation
Nineteen of the G20 leaders stated their strong commitment to dealing with climate change. U.S. President Donald Trump's opposition was left as a footnote.
The latest G20 documents illustrate how far the Trump administration's climate change views are from those of the rest of the world.
Jul 10, 2017
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10072017/g20-climate-change-paris-agreement-ambition-fossil-fuel-subsidies-trump-isolated
Trump is isolated - and the days of fossil fuel are running out
The majority of the world’s richest nations recognise the urgency of the climate change crisis and are ready to act
by Anne Hidalgo | Mayor of Paris
10 July 2017
http://news.trust.org/item/20170710053758-zumf9/
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Larsen C calves trillion tonne iceberg
Smoking gun, the #LarsenC iceberg has broken free! @ESA_EO @BAS_News @NERCscience #Sentinel1
8:14 AM - 12 Jul 2017
[ https://twitter.com/CPOM_news/status/885110103325769728 (no comments yet), via https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/12/giant-antarctic-iceberg-breaks-free-of-larsen-c-ice-shelf (with comments)]
A map of the Larsen C ice shelf, overlaid with a NASA thermal image from July 12, shows where the iceberg has calved.
[ http://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/massive-iceberg-breaks-antarctica-one-scientist-says-it-s-suspicious-n782231 ]
July 12, 2017
A one trillion tonne iceberg – one of the biggest ever recorded - has calved away from the Larsen C Ice Shelf in Antarctica. The calving occurred sometime between Monday 10th July and Wednesday 12th July 2017, when a 5,800 square km section of Larsen C finally broke away. The iceberg, which is likely to be named A68, weighs more than a trillion tonnes. Its volume is twice that of Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes.
[...]
http://www.projectmidas.org/blog/calving/ [and see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=126997578 and preceding (and any future following)]
Brief Communication: Newly developing rift in Larsen C Ice Shelf presents significant risk to stability
15 Jun 2015
Abstract
An established rift in the Larsen C Ice Shelf, formerly constrained by a suture zone containing marine ice, grew rapidly during 2014 and is likely in the near future to generate the largest calving event since the 1980s and result in a new minimum area for the ice shelf. Here we investigate the recent development of the rift, quantify the projected calving event and, using a numerical model, assess its likely impact on ice shelf stability. We find that the ice front is at risk of becoming unstable when the anticipated calving event occurs.
http://www.the-cryosphere.net/9/1223/2015/ [id.]
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Trump leaves leaders fearing the future as G-20 summit closes
By Michael Birnbaum and Damian Paletta
July 8, 2017
HAMBURG — President Trump and other world leaders on Saturday emerged from two days of talks unable to resolve key differences on core issues such as climate change and globalization, slapping an exclamation point on a divisive summit that left other nations fearing for the future of global alliances in the Trump era.
The scale of disharmony was remarkable for the annual Group of 20 meeting of world economic powers, a venue better known for sleepy bromides about easy-to-agree-on issues. Even as negotiators made a good-faith effort to bargain toward consensus, European leaders said that a chasm has opened between the United States and the rest of the world.
“Our world has never been so divided,” French President Emmanuel Macron said as the talks broke up. “Centrifugal forces have never been so powerful. Our common goods have never been so threatened.”
The divisions were most bitter on climate change, where 19 leaders formed a unified front against Trump. But even in areas of nominal compromise, such as trade, top European leaders said they have little faith that an agreement forged today could hold tomorrow.
Macron said world leaders found common ground on terrorism but were otherwise split on numerous important topics. He also said there were rising concerns about “authoritarian regimes, and even within the Western world, there are real divisions and uncertainties that didn’t exist just a few short years ago.”
“I will not concede anything in the direction of those who are pushing against multilateralism,” Macron said, without directly referring to Trump. “We need better coordination, more coordination. We need those organizations that were created out of the Second World War. Otherwise, we will be moving back toward narrow-minded nationalism.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who hosted the summit in the port city of Hamburg, said there had been some areas of agreement. But she did little to hide her disappointment about U.S. actions on climate change.
“Wherever there is no consensus that can be achieved, disagreement has to be made clear,” Merkel said at the end of the summit. “Unfortunately — and I deplore this — the United States of America left the climate agreement.”
“I am gratified to note that the other 19 members of the G-20 feel the Paris agreement is irreversible,” Merkel said.
Perhaps as a way to emphasize global unity — minus the United States — Macron announced there would be another climate summit in Paris in December to mark the two-year anniversary of the climate accord.
On trade, G-20 leaders agreed to try to address what the White House claims is a global steel glut. Trump officials have threatened to restrict steel imports, risking the start of a global trade war, after it has repeatedly alleged that China subsidizes the industry, which helps it lower prices and put U.S. steel jobs at risk.
The promises to draw up policy changes on steel production were a victory, White House officials said.
But with the U.S. decision to impose steel restrictions still up in the air, Merkel said Saturday’s agreements did little to resolve the future.
“The negotiations remain difficult, but we have been able to get satisfactory results in place,” Merkel said. “Now, what’s going to happen tomorrow or the day after, I cannot make any predictions on.”
One official said that Europeans were sharply unsettled by their encounters with Trump — and they recognized that may be the intention of the White House.
“It seems clear that President Trump is committed to being less predictable and not necessarily seeing predictability as positive in foreign policy,” said the European official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly assess the White House.
The summit came after Trump softened his opposition to some other multilateral institutions. After challenging the NATO defense alliance, he endorsed its all-for-one, one-for-all principles just ahead of the G-20 summit. And Trump has agreed to abide by the North American Free Trade Agreement, so long as it can be renegotiated.
White House officials also saw the potential to draw a win from the Hamburg summit, even if their expectations were measured. They hoped to explain Trump’s priorities and find compromises, even small ones.
Their assessment of the outcome was sharply different from Merkel and Macron’s cautious tone.
“It’s been a really great success,” a senior White House official who was not authorized to speak on the record said Saturday before Trump departed for the United States. “We are going to get some of the priorities of the administration” out of this summit.
White House officials pointed to several minor changes to the G-20’s official statement on trade policy, saying it better reflects the Trump administration’s point of view.
“We recognise that the benefits of international trade and investment have not been shared widely enough,” the G-20 countries said in a joint statement. “We need to better enable our people to seize the opportunities.”
Similar language was not in the G-20 agreement in 2016 before Trump’s election.
The White House also won a bitter battle over its desire to include language that promoted U.S. fossils fuels in the final statement — wording that European leaders sharply opposed.
Trump also prodded other countries to intensify a review of the overproduction of steel, something Trump alleges has ravaged the U.S. steel industry because it cannot compete with cheaper prices from countries such as China. In response to the White House push, the G-20 agreed to share information about steel production by August and to publish a formal report with recommendations by November. There probably will not be consequences if the deadlines are missed, but it creates a formal process for the White House to amplify its complaints.
Global steel manufacturing has soared, with China accounting for half the world’s production, compared with 15 percent in 2000, although the United States imports relatively little from China. Beijing agreed to the new G-20 steel requirements on Saturday.
Although the shifts may constitute short-term victories for Trump, one former senior official with the International Monetary Fund said Washington may have incurred long-term losses.
“It comes at a cost of eroding U.S. leadership,” said Eswar Prasad, a senior professor at Cornell University. “If even in calm times such rifts are exposed, it could make it more complicated for the group to work together in more complicated circumstances.”
Trump also had the chance to forge one-on-one relationships with leaders as the summit unfolded around him. It included his first face-to-face meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which stretched more than two hours, and also his first post-election meeting with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.
Relations between the United States and Mexico have been strained since Trump took office, in part because of the U.S. leader’s insistence that Mexico would pay for the creation of a new wall along the U.S. border. When reporters were briefly allowed in the room for their meeting on Friday and he was asked whether he still wanted Mexico to pay for the wall, Trump responded “absolutely.”
Peña Nieto did not agree to pay for the construction of the wall during the meeting, and a person briefed on the discussions said Trump did not press the issue during their talks.
There were other signs that Trump enjoyed the visit. At a dinner and reception for world leaders and their spouses Friday night, Trump was among the last to leave. At an event Saturday morning to announce an initiative to fund female entrepreneurship, Trump called Merkel “incredible,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “spectacular,” and declared that World Bank President Jim Yong Kim “would be a great appointment.”
On Twitter, Trump called the summit a “wonderful success” that was “carried out beautifully” by Merkel. He also said he had “an excellent meeting on trade & North Korea” with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Still, Trump did little to celebrate the G-20’s outcome. President Barack Obama typically marked the end of global summits with a news conference, weighing in on issues he and other leaders discussed.
And on Saturday, many other world leaders, including Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, held lengthy briefings with reporters in Hamburg.
Trump had a different plan. When the summit ended, the president and his aides got in their motorcade, went right to the airport and flew back to the United States.
Isaac Stanley-Becker and Abby Phillip contributed to this report.
© 2017 The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-leaves-leaders-fearing-the-future-as-g-20-summit-breaks/2017/07/08/daed41be-634f-11e7-84a1-a26b75ad39fe_story.html [with embedded videos, and (approaching 5,000) comments]
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Will Trump Start a Trade War?
The president’s decision on steel will serve as a telling sign.
Jul 11, 2017
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/trump-bannon-steel/533196/ [with comments]
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Donald Trump 'has no desire and no capacity to lead the world', Chris Uhlmann says
Published on Jul 9, 2017 by ABC News (Australia) [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVgO39Bk5sMo66-6o6Spn6Q / https://www.youtube.com/user/NewsOnABC , https://www.youtube.com/user/NewsOnABC/videos ]
At G20, Donald Trump underlined he has neither the desire nor the capacity to lead the world and you got the strong sense some leaders were trying to find the best way to work around him, says Chris Uhlmann.
Read more here: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-09/did-trumps-g20-performance-indicate-us-decline-as-world-power/8691538
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6_ckWZCHW4 [comments disabled] [and see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132836992 and preceding and following]
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The Trump Vision for America Abroad
President Trump at the G-20 summit conference in Hamburg, Germany, this month.
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
By GARY D. COHN and H. R. McMASTER
JULY 13, 2017
President Trump just concluded a second overseas trip to further advance America’s interests and values, and to strengthen our alliances around the world. Both this and his first trip demonstrated the resurgence of American leadership to bolster common interests, affirm shared values, confront mutual threats and achieve renewed prosperity.
Discussions with world leaders highlighted extraordinary potential: vast supplies of affordable energy, untapped markets that can be opened to new commerce, a growing number of young people seeking the chance to build better futures in their homelands and new partnerships among nations that can form the basis for lasting peace. At every opportunity abroad, President Trump articulated his vision for securing the American homeland, enhancing American prosperity and advancing American influence.
Meetings in Poland and at the Group of 20 summit conference in Germany focused on building coalitions to get the best possible outcomes for America and for our allies. The United States cannot be a passive member of international organizations. We are working with friends to confront common threats, seize mutually beneficial opportunities and press for solutions to shared problems.
In Warsaw, President Trump spoke to the Polish people and reiterated our commitment to mutual support and defense of Poland and our NATO allies against common threats. He affirmed that a “strong Poland is a blessing to Europe” and that “a strong Europe is a blessing to the West and to the world.”
He also met with 12 leaders of the Three Seas nations and pledged America’s commitment to expanding access to affordable and reliable energy in the Baltic States, Central Europe and the Balkans. Helping countries diversify their energy sources strengthens economies, creates jobs and prevents adversaries from using energy to intimidate or coerce. During a dinner President Trump hosted with President Moon Jae-in of South Korea and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan in Hamburg, the leaders agreed on a common strategy to confront the threat of North Korea and ensure the security of Northeast Asia and the United States.
Central to President Trump’s approach is that the United States will seek areas of agreement and cooperation while still protecting American interests. At the G-20, the United States supported open trade but insisted that it be fair. The G-20 communiqué [ https://www.g20.org/Content/EN/_Anlagen/G20/G20-leaders-declaration.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=2 ] recognized “the importance of reciprocal and mutually advantageous trade,” and all leaders agreed to do more to eliminate excess capacity in industrial sectors such as steel. Because of American leadership, all G-20 nations joined together in making an urgent call “for the removal of market distorting subsidies and other types of support by governments” to “foster a truly level playing field.”
The G-20 leaders agreed that a strong economy and a healthy planet are mutually reinforcing. America will continue to lead by example in demonstrating that market forces and technology-driven solutions are the most effective means of protecting the environment while fueling economic growth.
On migration, the leaders reaffirmed the “sovereign right of states to manage and control their borders.” They discussed the need to “address the root causes of displacement” and create better opportunities for people to remain in their home countries and rebuild their communities.
Perhaps most important, President Trump affirmed on this trip that America First is grounded in American values — values that not only strengthen America but also drive progress throughout the world. America champions the dignity of every person, affirms the equality of women, celebrates innovation, protects freedom of speech and of religion, and supports free and fair markets.
For example, to help empower women across the globe, the United States joined with the World Bank in an initiative to provide more than $1 billion to advance entrepreneurship. This effort will help women in developing countries gain increased access to the capital, markets and networks needed to start and grow businesses in the modern economy. And the United States remains the world’s single largest source of humanitarian assistance. At the G-20, we committed an additional $639 million to help save the lives of the millions of people threatened by famine — and called on other nations to join us in doing more to address this humanitarian catastrophe.
Of course, the United States — along with nations around the world — continues to face serious challenges, including the menace of terrorism and the threat of rogue regimes. Working with other nations allows us our best opportunity to address these challenges. For example, in a meeting with President Joko Widodo of Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, the two leaders affirmed the commitment made in Saudi Arabia to block funding for terrorists and those who advance their hateful ideology. In the formal communiqué [ http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_STATEMENT-17-1955_en.htm ] on countering terrorism, all G-20 nations affirmed that we “strongly condemn all terrorist attacks worldwide and stand united and firm in the fight against terrorism and its financing.” In many discussions with allies and partners at the G-20, leaders agreed that North Korea is a global threat that requires collective action.
America First is rooted in confidence that our values are worth defending and promoting. This is a time of great challenge for our friends and allies around the globe — but it is also a moment of extraordinary opportunity. The American delegation returned from the trip with tremendous optimism about the future and what the United States, our allies and our partners can achieve together.
Gary D. Cohn is the director of the National Economic Council. Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster is the national security adviser.
© 2017 The New York Times Company
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/opinion/the-trump-vision-for-america-abroad.html [with comments]
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Poll: Negative Campaign Against Arabs And Muslims Has Consequences
Jonathan Ernst / Reuters
By James Zogby
07/08/2017 09:21 am ET | Updated July 10, 2017
While, as president, Donald Trump has worked to cultivate a relationship with Arab leaders, the antipathy towards Arabs and Muslims that he and his party have cultivated in recent years continues to have a worrisome impact on American public opinion and policy.
Recent polling [ https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/aai/pages/12443/attachments/original/1499692427/2017_AAI_American_Attitudes_Poll.pdf ] conducted three weeks after Trump’s summits in Saudi Arabia, establishes the persistence of a deep and disturbing partisan divide in American attitudes toward Arabs and Muslims. On many questions, the views of Democrats and Republicans are exactly the opposite of one another, with Republican attitudes toward the two communities being extremely negative and the views of Democrats being overwhelming positive. For example, even after Trump’s visit, only 18% of Republicans have a favorable view of Muslims while only 20% have favorable views of Arabs. This stands in marked contrast to the 59% and 58% of Democrats who are favorably inclined toward Muslims and Arabs, respectively.
These are some of the observations that can be gleaned from the latest Zogby Analytics poll conducted for the Arab American Institute in mid-June of this year. The AAI/ZA poll surveyed 1,012 voters nationwide.
AAI/ZA have annually examined US opinion on these issues for two decades in order to better understand attitudes toward Arabs and Muslims and the challenges faced by Arab Americans and American Muslims. As a result, it is possible to observe changes over time.
It was during the 2010 congressional elections that the GOP first attempted to exploit fear of Muslims for partisan political purposes. While the effort did not have an appreciable impact on the election, itself, the continuation of this effort during the next two election cycles has resulted a sizable shift in Republican attitudes not only toward Arabs and Muslims, but Americans either of Arab ancestry or the Muslim faith.
AAI/ZA polling conducted in December of 2015 [ http://www.aaiusa.org/american_attitudes_toward_arabs_and_muslims_2015 ], after 6 years of anti-Muslim campaigning, shows the “mirror image” effect in place with Democrats recording 47% favorable/28% unfavorable attitudes toward American Muslims as compared with Republican’s 25% favorable/53% unfavorable attitudes.
If there has been any “Trump effect” on attitudes, it has been to increase the favorable attitudes of Democrats toward Arabs and Muslims. For example, Democrats’ favorable attitudes toward Arab Americans increased from 51% in 2015 to 58% this year, while the positive rating given to American Muslims jumped from 47% to 61%. Meanwhile, Republican favorable attitudes toward American Muslims remained at a low 25%, while dropping from 34% in 2015 to 31% for Arab Americans.
Even more pronounced are the differences in attitudes between those who identify as Trump voters versus those who say they voted for Hillary Clinton. Clinton supporters give a 62% favorable rating to Arab Americans and a 64% rating to American Muslims. Only 32% of Trump supporters view Arab Americans positively and only 28% rate American Muslims positively.
This is not just a question of “liking or not liking” the two communities, these negative attitudes have consequences for government policy. With Republicans in control of the White House, Congress, and most state governments, the attitudes of the Republican voters matter to GOP officeholders.
What our polling shows is that on issues that affect the lives of Arab Americans and American Muslims ranging from immigration to civil liberties, the partisan divide is substantial and explains, in part, Republican support for policies hostile to both groups.
For example, while a plurality of Americans (48% to 30%) oppose restricting rights in the name of security, Republicans and Trump voters are in favor of such policies. And while Americans are evenly divided on whether law enforcement are justified in using ethnic or religious profiling in dealing with Arab Americans and American Muslims, Republicans and Trump voters support such profiling by greater than four to one (in the case of Trump voters 63% in favor with only 14% opposed).
And while a significant majority of all Americans agree that there has been an increase in discrimination and hate against Arab Americans and American Muslims, breaking down the numbers we find a huge partisan divide. For example, in response to the question “is there an increase of discrimination against Arab Americans” 53% say “yes”, 20% say “no” (Democrats are 73% “yes”/10% “no”; while Trump voters are 31% “yes”/39% “no”).
The same divide is in evidence with regard to Trump’s proposals to ban immigrants and travelers who are Muslim or who are from Middle East countries, especially Syria. By a margin of 45% to 31%, American voters oppose such a ban, while Republicans strongly support a ban by a margin of 50% for it to only 24% opposed.
As we have found in previous polling, these negative attitudes not only increase the prospect of hate crimes being committed against both communities (note: hate crimes against both have increased dramatically in the past year), they also translate into suspicion about whether or not Arab Americans or American Muslims can be trusted to faithfully perform their duties if appointed to a government post. In December of 2015 we found that 48% of Republicans had no confidence that an Arab American could be trusted in such a post, while 63% had no confidence that an American Muslim could be trusted.
This situation is of deep concern to Arab Americans and American Muslims. We have, in the past, experienced discrimination, been victims of hate crimes, and endured painful political exclusion. It is clear that sustained hostile campaigns either by hardline supporters of Israel or, now, by some leading Republicans have taken a toll on our communities. They must be combated until our political discourse is freed from the scourge of hate, negative stereotyping, and scapegoating.
©2017 Oath Inc. Part of HuffPost • HPMG News
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/poll-negative-campaign-against-arabs-and-muslims-has_us_595fedd7e4b085e766b512a5 [no comments yet]
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Foreign students cool on US, UK after Trump, Brexit: report
More Chinese students are going to school in the US since Trump became president, according to the report.
Canada popular with Indian students; Chinese still favor US despite wider trends
July 9, 2017
Donald Trump’s election as president and Britain’s decision to exit the European Union has chilled foreign students on studying at US and UK colleges and universities, according to a report [ https://21tqmu3jseyp1msxha2oh5wz-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Brexit-report-June-2017.pdf ] by Hotcourses Group.
The global web-based course and university search service says Indian and Middle Eastern students seem especially leery of studying in the US in light of the political climate stirred by Trump’s election and travel bans promulgated against citizens from some Muslim nations.
The release of “Brexit Report: How has global demand for higher education shifted over the last 12 months?” also follows several shooting incidents in the US in which Indian Americans have been killed in suspected cases of anti-immigrant violence.
[...]
http://www.atimes.com/article/foreign-students-cool-us-uk-trump-brexit-report/ [with comment]
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SPECIAL REPORT with Alex Jones - Message To The Left About Donald Trump
Published on Jul 8, 2017 by Ron Gibson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBSpHkA7Jqw [with comments] [no official Alex Jones upload (yet) at https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel/videos ] [a must-watch]
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Trump Team Met With Lawyer Linked to Kremlin During Campaign
President Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. in January.
Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
By JO BECKER, MATT APUZZO and ADAM GOLDMAN
JULY 8, 2017
Update: The Times is now reporting that Donald Trump Jr. was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before the meeting. Read the story [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/09/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html (in full, second below)].
Two weeks after Donald J. Trump [ http://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/donald-trump ] clinched the Republican presidential nomination last year, his eldest son arranged a meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan with a Russian lawyer who has connections to the Kremlin, according to confidential government records described to The New York Times.
The previously unreported meeting was also attended by Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman at the time, Paul J. Manafort, as well as the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, according to interviews and the documents, which were outlined by people familiar with them.
While President Trump has been dogged by revelations of undisclosed meetings between his associates and Russians, this episode at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, is the first confirmed private meeting between a Russian national and members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle during the campaign. It is also the first time that his son Donald Trump Jr. is known to have been involved in such a meeting.
Representatives of Donald Trump Jr. and Mr. Kushner confirmed the meeting after The Times approached them with information about it. In a statement, Donald Jr. described the meeting as primarily about an adoption program. The statement did not address whether the presidential campaign was discussed.
American intelligence agencies have concluded [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/us/politics/russia-hack-report.html ] that Russian hackers and propagandists worked to tip the election toward Mr. Trump, and a special prosecutor and congressional committees are now investigating whether his campaign associates colluded with Russians. Mr. Trump has disputed that, but the investigation has cast a shadow over his administration for months.
Mr. Trump has also equivocated on whether the Russians were solely responsible for the hacking. But in Germany on Friday, meeting President Vladimir V. Putin for the first time as president, Mr. Trump questioned him about the hacking [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/world/europe/trump-putin-g20.html ]. The Russian leader denied meddling in the election.
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.
Natalia Veselnitskaya
The adoption impasse is a frequently used talking point for opponents of the Magnitsky Act. Ms. Veselnitskaya’s campaign against the law has also included attempts to discredit its namesake, Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer and auditor who died in mysterious circumstances in a Russian prison in 2009 after exposing one of the biggest corruption scandals during Mr. Putin’s rule.
Ms. Veselnitskaya was formerly married to a former deputy transportation minister of the Moscow region, and her clients include state-owned businesses and a senior government official’s son, whose company was under investigation in the United States at the time of the meeting. Her activities and associations had previously drawn the attention of the F.B.I., according to a former senior law enforcement official.
In his statement, Donald Trump Jr. said: “It was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up.”
He added: “I was asked to attend the meeting by an acquaintance, but was not told the name of the person I would be meeting with beforehand.”
Late Saturday, Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the president’s lawyer, issued a statement implying that the meeting was a setup. Ms. Veselnitskaya and the translator who accompanied her to the meeting “misrepresented who they were,” it said.
In an interview, Mr. Corallo explained that Ms. Veselnitskaya, in her anti-Magnitsky campaign, employs a private investigator whose firm, Fusion GPS, produced an intelligence dossier [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/us/politics/donald-trump-russia-intelligence.html ] that contained unproven allegations [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/us/politics/trump-intelligence-report-explainer.html ] against the president. The firm could not be reached for comment.
Donald Trump Jr. had denied participating in any campaign-related meetings with Russian nationals when he was interviewed by The Times in March. “Did I meet with people that were Russian? I’m sure, I’m sure I did,” he said. “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.”
Asked at that time whether he had ever discussed government policies related to Russia, the younger Mr. Trump replied, “A hundred percent no.”
Paul Manafort at the Republican National Convention last year in Cleveland.
Eric Thayer for The New York Times
The Trump Tower meeting was not disclosed to government officials until recently, when Mr. Kushner, who is also a senior White House aide, filed a revised version of a form required to obtain a security clearance. The Times reported in April [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/us/politics/jared-kushner-russians-security-clearance.html ] that he had failed to disclose any foreign contacts, including meetings with the Russian ambassador to the United States and the head of a Russian state bank. Failure to report such contacts can result in a loss of access to classified information and even, if information is knowingly falsified or concealed, in imprisonment.
Mr. Kushner’s advisers said at the time that the omissions were an error, and that he had immediately notified the F.B.I. that he would be revising the filing. They also said he had met with the Russians in his official transition capacity as a main point of contact for foreign officials.
In a statement on Saturday, Mr. Kushner’s lawyer, Jamie Gorelick, said: “He has since submitted this information, including that during the campaign and transition, he had over 100 calls or meetings with representatives of more than 20 countries, most of which were during transition. Mr. Kushner has submitted additional updates and included, out of an abundance of caution, this meeting with a Russian person, which he briefly attended at the request of his brother-in-law Donald Trump Jr. As Mr. Kushner has consistently stated, he is eager to cooperate and share what he knows.”
Mr. Kushner’s lawyers addressed questions about his disclosure but deferred to Donald Trump Jr. on questions about the meeting itself.
Mr. Manafort, the former campaign chairman, also recently disclosed the meeting, and Donald Trump Jr.’s role in organizing it, to congressional investigators who had questions about his foreign contacts, according to people familiar with the events.
A spokesman for Mr. Manafort declined to comment. In response to questions, Ms. Veselnitskaya said the meeting lasted about 30 minutes and focused on the Magnitsky Act and the adoption issue.
“Nothing at all was discussed about the presidential campaign,” she said, adding, “I have never acted on behalf of the Russian government and have never discussed any of these matters with any representative of the Russian government.”
Because Donald Trump Jr. does not serve in the administration and does not have a security clearance, he was not required to disclose his foreign contacts. Federal and congressional investigators have not publicly asked for any records that would require his disclosure of Russian contacts. It is not clear whether the Justice Department was aware of the meeting before Mr. Kushner disclosed it recently. Neither Mr. Kushner nor Mr. Manafort was required to disclose the content of the meeting in their government filings.
During the campaign, Donald Trump Jr. served as a close adviser to his father, frequently appearing at campaign events. Since the president took office, the younger Mr. Trump and his brother, who have worked for the Trump Organization for most of their adult lives, assumed day-to-day control of their father’s real estate empire.
A quick internet search reveals Ms. Veselnitskaya as a formidable operator with a history of pushing the Kremlin’s agenda. Most notable is her campaign against the Magnitsky Act, which provoked a Cold War-style, tit-for-tat row with the Kremlin when President Barack Obama signed it into law in 2012.
Under the law, some 44 Russian citizens have been put on a list that allows the United States to seize their American assets and deny them visas. The United States asserts that many of them are connected to fraud exposed by Mr. Magnitsky, who after being jailed for more than a year was found dead in his cell. A Russian human rights panel found that he had been assaulted. To critics of Mr. Putin, Mr. Magnitsky, in death, became a symbol of corruption and brutality in the Russian state.
An infuriated Mr. Putin has called the law an “outrageous act,” and, in addition to banning American adoptions, compiled what became known as an “anti-Magnitsky” blacklist of United States citizens.
Among those blacklisted was Preet Bharara, then the United States attorney in Manhattan, who led high-profile convictions of Russian arms and drug dealers. Mr. Bharara was abruptly fired [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/us/politics/preet-bharara-us-attorney.html ] in March, after previously being asked to stay on by Mr. Trump.
One of Ms. Veselnitskaya’s clients is Denis Katsyv, the Russian owner of a Cyprus-based investment company called Prevezon Holdings. He is the son of Petr Katsyv, the vice president of the state-owned Russian Railways and a former deputy governor of the Moscow region. In a civil forfeiture case prosecuted by Mr. Bharara’s office, the Justice Department alleged that Prevezon had helped launder money tied to a $230 million corruption scheme exposed by Mr. Magnitsky by parking it in New York real estate and bank accounts. As a result, the government froze $14 million of its assets. Prevezon recently settled the case for $6 million without admitting wrongdoing.
Ms. Veselnitskaya and her client hired a team of political and legal operatives that has worked unsuccessfully in Washington to repeal the Magnitsky Act. They also tried but failed to keep Mr. Magnitsky’s name off a new law that takes aim at human-rights abusers across the globe.
Besides the private investigator whose firm produced the Trump dossier, the lobbying team included Rinat Akhmetshin, an émigré to the United States who once served as a Soviet military officer and who has been called a Russian political gun for hire.
Ms. Veselnitskaya was also deeply involved in the making of an anti-Magnitsky film [ https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/10/world/europe/sergei-magnitsky-russia-vladimir-putin.html ] that premiered just weeks before the Trump Tower meeting. Titled “The Magnitsky Act — Behind the Scenes,” the film echoes the Kremlin line that the widely accepted version of Mr. Magnitsky’s life and death is wrong. The film claims that he was not assaulted and alleges that he never testified that government officials conspired to steal $230 million in fraudulent tax rebates.
In the film’s telling, the true culprit of the fraud was William F. Browder, an American-born financier who hired Mr. Magnitsky to investigate the fraud after he had three of his investment funds companies in Russia seized. On RussiaTV5, a station whose owners are known to be close to Mr. Putin, Ms. Veselnitskaya was lauded as “one of those who gave the film crew the real proofs and records of testimony.”
Mr. Browder, who stopped the screening of the film in Europe by threatening libel suits, called the film a state-sponsored smear campaign.
“She’s not just some private lawyer,” Mr. Browder said of Ms. Veselnitskaya. “She is a tool of the Russian government.”
John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, testified in May that he had been concerned last year by Russian government efforts to contact and manipulate members of Mr. Trump’s campaign. “Russian intelligence agencies do not hesitate at all to use private companies and Russian persons who are unaffiliated with the Russian government to support their objectives,” he said.
The F.B.I. began a counterintelligence investigation [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/20/us/politics/fbi-investigation-trump-russia-comey.html ] last July into Russian contacts with any Trump associates. Agents focused on Mr. Manafort and a pair of advisers, Carter Page [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/19/us/politics/carter-page-russia-trump.html ] and Roger J. Stone.
Among those now under investigation is Michael T. Flynn, who was forced to resign as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser after it became known that he had falsely denied speaking to the Russian ambassador about sanctions imposed by the Obama administration over the election hacking.
Congress later discovered that Mr. Flynn had been paid more than $65,000 by companies linked to Russia, and that he had failed to disclose those payments when he renewed his security clearance and underwent an additional background check to join the White House staff.
In May, the president fired the F.B.I. director [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/us/politics/james-comey-fired-fbi.html ], James B. Comey, who days later provided information about a meeting with Mr. Trump at the White House. According to Mr. Comey, the president asked him to end the bureau’s investigation into Mr. Flynn; Mr. Trump has repeatedly denied making such a request. Robert S. Mueller III, a former F.B.I. director, was then appointed as special counsel [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/us/politics/robert-mueller-special-counsel-russia-investigation.html ].
The status of Mr. Mueller’s investigation is not clear, but he has assembled a veteran team of prosecutors and agents to dig into any possible collusion.
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© 2017 The New York Times Company
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html [with comments]
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Trump Jr. says he, Kushner and Manafort met with lawyer tied to Kremlin
Donald Trump Jr. says he, brother-in-law Jared Kushner and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort met with a Russian lawyer shortly after Donald Trump won the Republican nomination.
By Tom Hamburger and Rosalind S. Helderman
July 8, 2017
The president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., acknowledged attending a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer tied to the Kremlin, one of the first confirmed encounters between President Trump’s inner circle and a Russian national during the presidential campaign.
In a statement distributed Saturday evening, Trump Jr. confirmed he had participated in a “short introductory meeting,” which, per his request, was also attended by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and the chair of the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort.
“We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at that time and there was no follow-up,” Trump Jr. said in the statement. “I was asked to attend the meeting by an acquaintance, but was not told the name of the person I would be meeting with beforehand.”
The meeting was reported Saturday by the New York Times [just above, in full].
Kushner’s lawyer said in a statement that the president’s son-in-law had disclosed the session previously on his security clearance forms. But the new public report adds to the roster of curious private meetings between Trump allies and Russians during and after the campaign.
The meeting between the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and the president’s inner circle became public the day after President Trump met in Germany with Russian President Vladimir Putin for the first time. Trump questioned Putin about Russian meddling during the 2016 election; the Russian leader denied any such interference.
Veselnitskaya is well known to advocates of sanctions against Russia, particularly the Magnitsky Act [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/the-roots-of-the-hostility-between-putin-and-clinton/2016/07/28/85ca74ca-5402-11e6-b652-315ae5d4d4dd_story.html ], which prohibits U.S. interaction with Russians alleged to have committed human rights violations. Congress’s passage of the law in 2012 angered Putin and led him to retaliate by halting American adoptions of Russian children.
The adoption issue is frequently used as a talking point by opponents of the Magnitsky Act, said William Browder, an American financier who worked in Russia and lobbied for the sanctions, which are named after an auditor Browder employed, Sergei L. Magnitsky. Magnitsky died in a Russian prison under mysterious circumstances in 2009 after exposing a corruption scandal.
The act lists the names of individuals in Russia, including judges and other public officials, effectively blacklisting them from doing business in the United States.
“I can’t imagine that she brought up anything during the Trump Tower meeting other than the Magnitsky Act,” said Browder, who recalled Veselnitskaya defending her Russian clients against money-laundering allegations made by the U.S. government connected to a tax fraud that Magnitsky uncovered. The case was settled in May.
Veselnitskaya also had a major role in a public-relations campaign to repeal the Magnitsky Act that included a documentary film shown in Washington last year, Browder said.
Veselnitskaya did not return requests for comment from The Washington Post on Saturday.
Veselnitskaya told the New York Times that the participants in the meeting discussed the Magnitsky Act and the adoption issue. “Nothing at all was discussed about the presidential campaign,” she said, according to the Times. “I have never acted on behalf of the Russian government and have never discussed any of these matters with any representative of the Russian government.”
Manafort’s lawyer declined to comment on the Times report.
An attorney for Kushner, Jamie Gorelick, issued a statement emphasizing that the meeting had been disclosed earlier by Kushner.
“As we have previously stated, Mr. Kushner’s SF-86 was prematurely submitted and, among other errors, did not list any contacts with foreign government officials. The next day, Mr. Kushner submitted supplemental information stating that he had had ‘numerous contacts with foreign officials’ about which he would be happy to provide additional information,” the statement said. “ … Mr. Kushner has submitted additional updates and included, out of an abundance of caution, this meeting with a Russian person, which he briefly attended at the request of his brother-in-law, Donald Trump Jr. As Mr. Kushner has consistently stated, he is eager to cooperate and share what he knows.”
© 2017 The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-jr-says-he-kushner-and-manafort-met-with-lawyer-tied-to-kremlin/2017/07/08/18b86d36-6439-11e7-a4f7-af34fc1d9d39_story.html [with comments]
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Trump’s Son Met With Russian Lawyer After Being Promised Damaging Information on Clinton
Donald Trump Jr. in April. Mr. Trump, the president’s eldest son, arranged a meeting in June 2016 in New York with a Russian lawyer who has connections to the Kremlin.
Al Drago/The New York Times
By JO BECKER, MATT APUZZO and ADAM GOLDMAN
JULY 9, 2017
President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton [ http://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/hillary-rodham-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.
The meeting was also attended by his campaign chairman at the time, Paul J. Manafort, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kushner recently disclosed the meeting, though not its content, in confidential government documents described to The New York Times.
The Times reported the existence of the meeting [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html (in full, second above)] on Saturday. But in subsequent interviews, the advisers and others revealed the motivation behind it.
The meeting — at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, two weeks after Donald J. Trump [ http://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/donald-trump ] clinched the Republican nomination [ https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/us/politics/donald-trump-republican-nomination.html ] — 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.
While President Trump has been dogged by revelations of undisclosed meetings between his associates and the Russians, the episode at Trump Tower is the first such confirmed private meeting involving his inner circle during the campaign — as well as the first one known to have included his eldest son. It came at an inflection point in the campaign, when Donald Trump Jr., who served as an adviser and a surrogate, was ascendant and Mr. Manafort was consolidating power.
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.
When he was first asked about the meeting on Saturday, Donald Trump Jr. said that it was primarily about adoptions and mentioned nothing about Mrs. Clinton.
President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, also attended the meeting last year at Trump Tower.
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
But on Sunday, presented with The Times’s findings, he offered a new account. In a statement, he said he had met with the Russian lawyer at the request of an acquaintance from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, which his father took to Moscow. “After pleasantries were exchanged,” he said, “the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Mrs. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”
He said she then turned the conversation to adoption of Russian children and the Magnitsky Act, an American law that blacklists suspected Russian human rights abusers. The 2012 law so enraged President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that he halted American adoptions of Russian children.
“It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting,” Mr. Trump said.
Two people briefed on the meeting said the intermediary was Rob Goldstone, a former British tabloid journalist and the president of a company called Oui 2 Entertainment who has worked with the Miss Universe pageant. He did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the president’s lawyer, said on Sunday that “the president was not aware of and did not attend the meeting.”
Lawyers for Mr. Kushner referred to their statement a day earlier, confirming that he voluntarily disclosed the meeting but referring questions about it to Donald Trump Jr. Mr. Manafort declined to comment. In his statement, Donald Trump Jr. said he asked Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kushner to attend, but did not tell them what the meeting was about.
Political campaigns collect opposition research from many quarters but rarely from sources linked to foreign governments.
American intelligence agencies have concluded [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/us/politics/russia-hack-report.html ] that Russian hackers and propagandists worked to tip the election toward Donald J. Trump, in part by stealing and then providing to WikiLeaks internal Democratic Party and Clinton campaign emails that were embarrassing to Mrs. Clinton. WikiLeaks began releasing the material on July 22.
Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul J. Manafort, at the Republican National Convention in July 2016 in Cleveland.
Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
A special prosecutor and congressional committees are now investigating the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with the Russians. Mr. Trump has disputed that, but the investigation has cast a shadow over his administration.
Mr. Trump has also equivocated on whether the Russians were solely responsible for the hacking. On Sunday, two days after his first meeting as president with Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump said in a Twitter post [ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/884012097805406208 ]: “I strongly pressed President Putin twice about Russian meddling in our election. He vehemently denied it. I’ve already given my opinion......”
On Sunday morning on Fox News, the White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, described the Trump Tower meeting as a “big nothing burger.”
“Talking about issues of foreign policy, issues related to our place in the world, issues important to the American people is not unusual,” he said.
But Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the leading Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, one of the panels investigating Russian election interference, said he wanted to question “everyone that was at that meeting.”
“There’s no reason for this Russian government advocate to be meeting with Paul Manafort or with Mr. Kushner or the president’s son if it wasn’t about the campaign and Russia policy,” Mr. Schiff said after the initial Times report.
Ms. Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer invited to the Trump Tower meeting, is best known for mounting a multipronged attack against the Magnitsky Act.
The adoption impasse is a frequently used talking point for opponents of the act. Ms. Veselnitskaya’s campaign against the law has also included attempts to discredit the man after whom it was named, Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer and auditor who died in 2009 in mysterious circumstances in a Russian prison after exposing one of the biggest corruption scandals during Mr. Putin’s rule.
Ms. Veselnitskaya’s clients include state-owned businesses and a senior government official’s son, whose company was under investigation in the United States at the time of the meeting. Her activities and associations had previously drawn the attention of the F.B.I., according to a former senior law enforcement official.
Ms. Veselnitskaya said in a statement on Saturday that “nothing at all about the presidential campaign” was discussed at the Trump Tower meeting. She recalled that after about 10 minutes, either Mr. Kushner or Mr. Manafort left the room.
She said she had “never acted on behalf of the Russian government” and “never discussed any of these matters with any representative of the Russian government.”
The Trump Tower meeting was disclosed to government officials in recent weeks, when Mr. Kushner, who is also a senior White House aide, filed a revised version of a confidential form required to obtain a security clearance.
The Times reported in April [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/us/politics/jared-kushner-russians-security-clearance.html ] that he had not disclosed any foreign contacts, including meetings with the Russian ambassador to the United States and the head of a Russian state bank. Failure to report such contacts can result in a loss of access to classified information and even, if information is knowingly falsified or concealed, in imprisonment.
Mr. Kushner’s advisers said at the time that the omissions were an error, and that he had immediately notified the F.B.I. that he would be revising the filing.
Mr. Manafort, the former campaign chairman, also recently disclosed the meeting, and Donald Trump Jr.’s role in organizing it, to congressional investigators who had questions about his foreign contacts, according to people familiar with the events. Neither Mr. Manafort nor Mr. Kushner was required to disclose the content of the meeting.
Since the president took office, Donald Trump Jr. and his brother Eric have assumed day-to-day control of their father’s real estate empire. Because he does not serve in the administration and does not have a security clearance, Donald Trump Jr. was not required to disclose his foreign contacts. Federal and congressional investigators have not publicly asked for any records that would require his disclosure of Russian contacts.
But in an interview with The Times in March, he denied participating in any campaign-related meetings with Russian nationals. “Did I meet with people that were Russian? I’m sure, I’m sure I did,” he said. “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.”
In addition to her campaign against the Magnitsky Act, Ms. Veselnitskaya represents powerful players in Russia. Among her clients is Denis Katsyv, the Russian owner of Prevezon Holdings, an investment company based in Cyprus. He is the son of Petr Katsyv, the vice president of the state-owned Russian Railways and a former deputy governor of the Moscow region. In a civil forfeiture case in New York, the Justice Department alleged that Prevezon had helped launder money linked to the $230 million corruption scheme exposed by Mr. Magnitsky by putting it in real estate and bank accounts. Prevezon recently settled the case for $6 million without admitting wrongdoing.
Ms. Veselnitskaya and her client also hired a team of political and legal operatives in the United States. The team included Rinat Akhmetshin, an émigré to the United States who once served as a Soviet military officer and who has been called a Russian political gun for hire. Fusion GPS, a consulting firm that produced an intelligence dossier that contained unverified allegations about Mr. Trump, was also hired to do research for Prevezon.
The F.B.I. began a counterintelligence investigation [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/20/us/politics/fbi-investigation-trump-russia-comey.html ] last year into Russian contacts with any Trump associates. Agents focused on Mr. Manafort and a pair of advisers, Carter Page and Roger J. Stone Jr.
Among those now under investigation is Michael T. Flynn, who was forced to resign [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/13/us/politics/donald-trump-national-security-adviser-michael-flynn.html ] as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser after it became known that he had falsely denied speaking to the Russian ambassador about sanctions imposed by the Obama administration over the election hacking.
Congress later learned that Mr. Flynn had been paid more than $65,000 by companies linked to Russia, and that he had failed to disclose those payments when he renewed his security clearance and underwent an additional background check to join the White House staff.
In May, the president fired the F.B.I. director [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/us/politics/james-comey-fired-fbi.html ], James B. Comey, who days later provided information about a meeting with Mr. Trump at the White House. According to Mr. Comey, the president asked him to end the bureau’s investigation into Mr. Flynn; Mr. Trump has repeatedly denied making such a request. Robert S. Mueller III, a former F.B.I. director, was then appointed as special counsel [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/us/politics/robert-mueller-special-counsel-russia-investigation.html ].
The status of Mr. Mueller’s investigation is not clear, but he has assembled a veteran team of prosecutors and agents to dig into any possible collusion.
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JULY 9, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/09/us/donald-trump-jrs-two-different-explanations-for-russian-meeting.html
© 2017 The New York Times Company
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/09/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html [with comments]
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The Truth Behind Donald Trump, Jr.’s Meeting with a Russian Lawyer
The question of collusion with Russia is hardly the closed matter that President Trump has proposed it to be.
Photograph by Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty
By David Remnick
July 9, 2017
Don’t get ahead of the reporting. That’s one of the first lessons you’re supposed to learn as a novitiate in the church of journalism. Don’t assert what is not yet established by the facts. The consequences can be dire. In the rare case when Woodward and Bernstein stumbled during their Watergate reporting, it was because at one point they got a little ahead of their carefully established web of facts when it came to who was running the conspiracy. In the end, they were right, but the stumble allowed the Nixon Administration to charge, in modern parlance, #fakenews. “Shabby journalism” is what Ron Ziegler, the Sean Spicer of the Nixon era, called it.
The Trump Administration should not win any moral or political plaudits even if it turns out, in the end, that there was no collusion between the President’s campaign and the Russian government. Its countless sins of lying, conflict of interest, shady business transactions, character assassination, and so much else assures it a place in history as a uniquely grimy Administration. And we are not yet a half year into its reign.
So, unless we are grading on a curve that even the most forgiving god would discount, innocence in the matter of collusion does not bring the Trump Administration nearer to the gates of heaven. But the issue is hardly the closed matter that Trump would propose it to be. Thanks to new reporting from the Times [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/09/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html (in full just above)], we are starting to see evidence that fits the theory. Within two days of the President’s dispiritingly weak and erratic performance in Hamburg––his winsome meeting with Vladimir Putin, the disheartening spectacle of the Europeans treating the United States with suspicion on issues ranging from global security to the fate of the global environment––we learn that Trump associates, including the President’s son, met during the 2016 campaign with one Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Kremlin-connected lawyer, on the promise that she could provide them information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
The meeting took place on June 9, 2016, at Trump Tower. Trump’s emissaries included Donald Trump, Jr., who now helps to run the family businesses; Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who now helps to run the country; and his then campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who has a long history of business ties to Russia and pro-Russia Ukrainians, as well as a variety of political kleptocrats including Jonas Savimbi, Mobuto Sese Seko, and Ferdinand Marcos. The Trump team said there was nothing untoward about the meeting
“After pleasantries were exchanged,” Trump, Jr., told the Times, “the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.” Trump, Jr., went on to claim that the discussion was largely about the Russian ban on foreign adoptions. Reince Priebus, the President’s chief of staff, described the meeting on “Fox News Sunday” as a “big nothing burger.” For her part, Veselnitsyaka said that the meeting did not concern the campaign at all and that Manafort and Kushner left the room after ten minutes.
This follows the Wall Street Journal’s story [ https://www.wsj.com/articles/gop-operative-sought-clinton-emails-from-hackers-implied-a-connection-to-flynn-1498770851 ] last week that investigators have reviewed reports from intelligence agencies on Russian hackers discussing how to hack Clinton’s e-mails and get the material to Michael Flynn, the former N.S.A. chief, via an intermediary, and that Peter Smith, a longtime Republican operative, had undertaken an effort to obtain the Clinton e-mails and suggested to those around him that he was working with Flynn. The excuse the Trump Administration had for that one was that Smith “didn’t work for the campaign” and that if Flynn was working with him “in any way, it would have been in his capacity as a private individual.”
There has also been a great deal of solid journalism committed by Adam Davidson [ http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/donald-trumps-worst-deal ], of The New Yorker, Timothy O’Brien, of Bloomberg, and others on Trump’s business history and his links to disreputables in Russia and the former Soviet Union. All this begins to add up to an unlovely portrait of the President and his associates. In addition, the F.B.I. and congressional investigators are sorting through what, if any, relationship there might have been between the hundreds of Internet trolls who pumped out false, undermining stories about Clinton, Russian sponsors, and the Trump campaign. It is unlikely that the full story of the role of WikiLeaks in this saga has been told yet, either.
On his European trip, Trump has kept up his antic strategy of deflection and diversion, and, at the same time, he insists on demeaning his own intelligence services––on foreign soil, no less. To the embarrassment of an ungrateful nation, he tweeted that “everyone here is talking about why John Podesta refused to give the DNC server to the FBI and the CIA. Disgraceful!” Where to begin? No one in Europe was talking about John Podesta, who did not have control of the D.N.C. server and who has coöperated fully with investigators.
Trump went on to say from one lectern at the summit, “I remember when I was sitting back listening about Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, how everybody was a hundred per cent certain that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. Guess what? That led to one big mess. They were wrong, and it led to a mess.”
This is true up to a point, but is it applicable? What happened in 2003 is that the Bush Administration, led by Dick Cheney, pressured intelligence officials to provide the answer that it desired on weapons of mass destruction in order to invade Iraq; analysts themselves were hardly unanimous on the question of W.M.D. In this case, the intelligence agencies have repeatedly declared their confidence that Russian hackers tried to undermine the American election and that they did so at the direction of Vladimir Putin––the same person Trump declared in Hamburg he was “honored” to meet. We should see more of their evidence, where possible, but the analogy to the case of the Iraq deception is a thin reed.
So, yes, it is wrong to get ahead of the reporting. But the myriad implications of a hacked Presidential election, while too much to bear for the President—his ego seems to implode at any suggestion that his victory was possibly more complicated than the unambiguous “landslide” he imagines it to be—demands the answers that journalists, law enforcement, and Congress are pursuing. Part of that process is admitting error, as CNN did, quickly and responsibly recently after an errant story. Part of that process is having the patience to see what the truth, as it emerges over time, turns out to be. For now, we live in a moment when the President of the United States is, without shame, trying to intimidate the people whose business it is to come to an honest reckoning. He tries to intimidate the press. He has fired an F.B.I. director and considered going further. It’s reasonable to wonder why. Without assuming too much, too soon.
© 2017 Condé Nast
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-truth-behind-donald-trump-jrs-meeting-with-a-russian-lawyer
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Kellyanne Conway full 'New Day' interview
Published on Jul 10, 2017 by CNN [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCupvZG-5ko_eiXAupbDfxWw / https://www.youtube.com/user/CNN , https://www.youtube.com/user/CNN/videos ]
Counselor to President Trump Kellyanne Conway talks with CNN's Chris Cuomo about Trump and the Russia investigation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6UDVmtNt4E [with (nearly 4,000) comments]
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If There Was No Collusion, It Wasn’t for Lack of Trying
Donald Trump Jr. boards an elevator at Trump Tower.
Donald Trump Jr. made clear he was willing to receive damaging information about Hillary Clinton from a Russian lawyer in a June 2016 meeting.
Jul 10, 2017
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/if-there-wasnt-collusion-it-wasnt-for-lack-of-trying/533070/ [with comments]
Donald Trump Jr. just contradicted a whole bunch of White House denials of Russian contacts
1) Trump Jr. on Saturday: The meeting was about Russian adoption
2) Trump Jr. in March: No meetings “representing the campaign” with Russians
3) President-elect Trump in January: No contact between Trump associates and Russia during campaign
4) Hope Hicks: "No communication" with a foreign entity
5) Kellyanne Conway in December: “Absolutely not” on contact with Russians trying to meddle
6) Vice President Pence in January: “Of course not”
7) Spicer in February: Doesn't change Trump's January statement
8) Trump Jr. in July 2016: Suggestions that Russians tried to help Trump are “lies”
July 10, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/10/donald-trump-jr-just-contradicted-a-whole-bunch-of-white-house-denials-of-russian-contacts/ [with embedded video, and comments]
Meeting between Trump Jr. and Russian lawyer was requested by Russian pop star whose family is close to Putin
Donald Trump Jr. talks to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House in April 2017.
July 10, 2017
A meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer was set up at the request of Emin Agalarov, a Russian pop star whose Kremlin-connected family has done business with President Trump in the past, according to the person who arranged the meeting.
Rob Goldstone, a music publicist who represents Agalarov, confirmed on Monday that he requested the Trump Tower meeting at Agalarov’s request. Emin Agalarov and his father, Aras Agalarov, a wealthy Moscow real estate developer, helped sponsor the Trump-owned Miss Universe pageant in Russia in 2013.
After the pageant, the Agalarovs signed a preliminary deal with Trump to build a tower bearing his name in Moscow, though the deal has been on hold since Trump began running for president.
Goldstone had previously told The Washington Post that he set up and attended the meeting for the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, so that she could discuss the adoption of Russian children by Americans.
The revelations about the meeting come as federal prosecutors and congressional investigators explore whether the Trump campaign coordinated and encouraged Russian efforts to intervene in the election to hurt Clinton and elect Donald Trump.
In a new statement, Goldstone confirmed what Trump Jr. himself revealed Sunday: That he enticed the then-Republican candidate’s son by indicating that Veselnitskaya could provide damaging information about Democrats.
“The lawyer had apparently stated she had some information regarding illegal campaign contributions to the DNC which she believed Mr. Trump Jr. might find important,” he said.
At the meeting, which also included Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and a top campaign aide, Paul Manafort, the Russian lawyer offered “a few very general remarks” about campaign funding, Goldstone said.
She then proceeded to discuss the Magnitsky Act, a 2012 U.S. law that imposed sanctions on Russia for its alleged human rights abuses. Angered over the law, Russia retaliated by halting U.S. adoptions of Russian children.
Trump Jr. has said his father was unaware of the meeting, and both he and Goldstone said there was no additional follow-up beyond the brief June 2016 session.
The involvement of the Agalarovs brings the meeting closer to both Trump’s past business interests and to the Kremlin. Trump has spent time with both Emin Agalarov and his father, Aras — appearing in a music video for the Russian musician, which was filmed at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton Hotel in 2013.
Meanwhile, the Agalarovs are also close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Aras Agalarov’s company has been awarded several large state building contracts, and shortly after the pageant, Putin awarded the elder Agalarov the “Order of Honor of the Russian Federation,” a prestigious designation.
Emin Agalarov told The Post last year that he had spoken with Trump numerous times about the need to build stronger ties between Russia and the United States.
“He kept saying, ‘Every time there is friction between United States and Russia, it’s bad for both countries. For the people to benefit, this should be fixed. We should be friends,’ ” Emin Agalarov told The Post last year about his conversations with Trump.
A spokesman for the Agalarovs did not respond to request for comment, nor did a spokeswoman for Trump Jr.
On Monday, the Kremlin said it was unaware of a the meeting between Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer purported to have information that could potentially damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Asked about the meeting Monday, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters that the Kremlin does not know the lawyer, and added that the Kremlin “cannot keep track of every Russian lawyer and their meetings domestically or abroad.”
Peskov, asked about Veselnitskaya by reporters on a conference call, said, “We do not know who that is.”
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/kremlin-denies-knowing-of-donald-trump-jr-meeting-with-russian-lawyer-during-2016-campaign/2017/07/10/c2bfee34-6566-11e7-a1d7-9a32c91c6f40_story.html [with comments]
Why in the world would Donald Trump Jr. take this meeting?
Donald Trump Jr. delivers a speech during a ceremony for the official opening of the Trump International Tower and Hotel on Feb. 28 in Vancouver, Canada.
By Ruth Marcus
July 10, 2017
Imagine that you are Donald Trump Jr. Your father has just clinched the Republican nomination for president. An acquaintance, someone you know from the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, calls asking to set up a meeting [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/kremlin-denies-knowing-of-donald-trump-jr-meeting-with-russian-lawyer-during-2016-campaign/2017/07/10/c2bfee34-6566-11e7-a1d7-9a32c91c6f40_story.html ] with a Russian who, he says, has information helpful to the campaign — i.e., dirt on Hillary Clinton. Do you:
a) Worry that this doesn’t sound completely kosher and ask for a bit more information — for example, who is this person?
b) Worry that this doesn’t sound completely kosher and call the campaign lawyer to figure out how to proceed?
c) Invite the unknown Russian to come to Trump Tower and ask campaign chairman Paul Manafort and your brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, to sit in?
The right answers, for anyone who has been around politics and political campaigns, are a) or b). Trump Jr.’s answer, we now know [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html (in full above), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/09/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html (in full above)] — after his first, incredible-on-its-face explanation that in the midst of a presidential campaign the top brass paused for a meeting “primarily” about adoption of Russian children — was c): Come on down!
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2017/07/10/why-in-the-world-would-donald-trump-jr-take-this-meeting/ [with comments]
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Donald Trump Jr. Lawyers Up
The president’s son joins a grand White House tradition.
July 10, 2017
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/donald-trump-jr-lawyers-up
Donald Trump Jr. Has Hired A Lawyer Who Has Handled Organized Crime And Cybercrime Cases
Donald Trump Jr. has hired New York criminal defense lawyer Alan Futerfas, as the president’s son faces scrutiny for his meeting last year with a Russian lawyer.
July 10, 2017
https://www.buzzfeed.com/zoetillman/donald-trump-jr-has-hired-a-lawyer-who-has-handled [with comments]
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Trump Jr. Was Told in Email of Russian [Government] Effort to Aid Campaign
Donald Trump Jr. spoke at a rally in May in Bozeman, Montana.
William Campbell/Corbis, via Getty Images
By MATT APUZZO, JO BECKER, ADAM GOLDMAN and MAGGIE HABERMAN
JULY 10, 2017
WASHINGTON — Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email.
The email to the younger Mr. Trump was sent by Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid reporter who helped broker the June 2016 meeting. In a statement on Sunday, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he was interested in receiving damaging information about Mrs. Clinton, but gave no indication that he thought the lawyer might have been a Kremlin proxy.
Mr. Goldstone’s message, as described to The New York Times by the three people, indicates that the Russian government was the source of the potentially damaging information. It does not elaborate on the wider effort by Moscow to help the Trump campaign. There is no evidence to suggest that the promised damaging information was related to Russian government computer hacking that led to the release of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails.
But the email is likely to be of keen interest to the Justice Department and congressional investigators, who are examining whether any of President Trump’s associates colluded with the Russian government to disrupt last year’s election. American intelligence agencies have determined that the Russian government tried to sway the election in favor of Mr. Trump.
The Times first reported on the existence of the meeting on Saturday, and a fuller picture has emerged in subsequent days.
Alan Futerfas, the lawyer for the younger Mr. Trump, said his client had done nothing wrong but pledged to work with investigators if contacted.
“In my view, this is much ado about nothing. During this busy period, Robert Goldstone contacted Don Jr. in an email and suggested that people had information concerning alleged wrongdoing by Democratic Party front-runner, Hillary Clinton, in her dealings with Russia,” he told The Times in an email on Monday. “Don Jr.’s takeaway from this communication was that someone had information potentially helpful to the campaign and it was coming from someone he knew. Don Jr. had no knowledge as to what specific information, if any, would be discussed.”
It is unclear whether Mr. Goldstone had direct knowledge of the origin of the damaging material. One person who was briefed on the emails said it appeared that he was passing along information that had been passed through several others.
Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, and Paul J. Manafort, the campaign chairman at the time, also attended the June 2016 meeting in New York. Representatives for Mr. Kushner referred requests for comments back to an earlier statement, which said he had voluntarily disclosed the meeting to the federal government. He has deferred questions on the content of the meeting to Donald Trump Jr.
A spokesman for Mr. Manafort declined to comment.
But at the White House, the deputy press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was adamant from the briefing room lectern that “the president’s campaign did not collude in any way. Don Jr. did not collude with anybody to influence the election. No one within the Trump campaign colluded in order to influence the election.”
The president, a prolific Twitter user, did not address his son’s controversy on Monday, and instead sought to highlight other issues throughout the morning.
In a series of tweets, the president’s son insisted he had done what anyone connected to a political campaign would have done — hear out potentially damaging information about an opponent. He maintained that his various statements about the meeting were not in conflict.
“Obviously I’m the first person on a campaign to ever take a meeting to hear info about an opponent... went nowhere but had to listen,” he wrote in one tweet. In another, he added, “No inconsistency in statements, meeting ended up being primarily about adoptions. In response to further Q’s I simply provided more details.”
The younger Mr. Trump, who had a reputation during the campaign for having meetings with a wide range of people eager to speak to him, did not join his father’s administration. He runs the family business, the Trump Organization, with his brother Eric.
On Monday, after news reports that he had hired a lawyer, he indicated in a tweet that he would be open to speaking to the Senate Intelligence Committee, one of the congressional panels investigating Russian meddling in the election. “Happy to work with the committee to pass on what I know,” the younger Mr. Trump wrote.
Mr. Goldstone represents the Russian pop star Emin Agalarov, whose father was President Trump’s business partner in bringing the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in 2013. In an interview Monday, Mr. Goldstone said he was asked by Mr. Agalarov to set up the meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya.
“He said, ‘I’m told she has information about illegal campaign contributions to the D.N.C.,’” Mr. Goldstone recalled, referring to the Democratic National Committee. He said he then emailed Donald Trump Jr., outlining what the lawyer purported to have.
But Mr. Goldstone, who wrote the email over a year ago, denied any knowledge of involvement by the Russian government in the matter, saying that never dawned on him. “Never, never ever,” he said. Later, after the email was described to The Times, efforts to reach him for further comment were unsuccessful.
In the interview, he said it was his understanding that Ms. Veselnitskaya was simply a “private citizen” for whom Mr. Agalarov wanted to do a favor. He also said he did not know whether Mr. Agalarov’s father, Aras Agalarov, a Moscow real estate tycoon known to be close to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, was involved. The elder Mr. Agalarov and the younger Mr. Trump worked together to bring a Trump Tower to Moscow, but the project never got off the ground.
Emin Agalarov, right, spoke alongside Donald J. Trump and Erin Brady, Miss USA, in Las Vegas in 2013.
Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Mr. Goldstone also said his recollection of the meeting largely tracked with the account given by the president’s son, as outlined in the Sunday statement Mr. Trump issued in response to a Times article [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/09/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html (in full above)] on the June 2016 meeting. Mr. Goldstone said the last time he had communicated with the younger Mr. Trump was to send him a congratulatory text after the November election, but he added that he did speak to the Trump Organization over the past weekend, before giving his account to the news media.
Donald Trump Jr., who initially told The Times that Ms. Veselnitskaya wanted to talk about the resumption of adoption of Russian children by American families, acknowledged in the Sunday statement that one subject of the meeting was possibly compromising information about Mrs. Clinton. His decision to move ahead with such a meeting was unusual for a political campaign, but it was consistent with the haphazard approach the Trump operation, and the White House, have taken in vetting people they deal with ahead of time.
But he said that the Russian lawyer produced nothing of consequence, and that the meeting ended after she began talking about the Magnitsky Act — an American law that blacklists Russians suspected of human rights abuses. The 2012 law so enraged Mr. Putin that he halted American adoptions of Russian children.
Mr. Goldstone said Ms. Veselnitskaya offered “just a vague, generic statement about the campaign’s funding and how people, including Russian people, living all over the world donate when they shouldn’t donate” before turning to her anti-Magnitsky Act arguments.
“It was the most inane nonsense I’ve ever heard,” he said. “And I was actually feeling agitated by it. Had I, you know, actually taken up what is a huge amount of their busy time with this nonsense?”
Ms. Veselnitskaya, for her part, denied that the campaign or compromising material about Mrs. Clinton ever came up. She said she had never acted on behalf of the Russian government. A spokesperson for Mr. Putin said on Monday that he did not know Ms. Veselnitskaya, and that he had no knowledge of the June 2016 meeting.
Ms. Sanders said at a news briefing that the American president had learned of the meeting recently, but she declined to discuss details.
The White House press office, however, accused Mrs. Clinton’s team of hypocrisy. The office circulated a January 2017 article published in Politico, detailing how officials from the Ukranian government tried to help the Democratic candidate conduct opposition research on Mr. Trump and some of his aides.
News of the meeting involving the younger Mr. Trump, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Manafort blunted whatever good feeling the president’s team had after his trip to Europe for the Group of 20 economic summit meeting.
The president learned from his aides about the 2016 meeting at the end of the trip, according to a White House official. But some people in the White House had known for several days that it had occurred, because Mr. Kushner had revised his foreign contact disclosure document to include it.
The president was frustrated by the news of the meeting, according to a person close to him — less over the fact that it had happened, and more because it was yet another story about Russia that had swamped the news cycle.
Related Coverage
When the Kremlin Says ‘Adoptions,’ It Means ‘Sanctions’
JULY 10, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/world/americas/kremlin-adoptions-sanctions-russia.html
How a Pageant Led to a Trump Son’s Meeting With a Russian Lawyer
Rob Goldstone, a former British tabloid journalist and the president of a marketing company called Oui 2 Entertainment who has worked with the Miss Universe pageant, requested that Donald J. Trump Jr. meet with the lawyer connected to the Kremlin.
JULY 10, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/us/politics/rob-goldstone-russia-trump.html
© 2017 The New York Times Company
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/us/politics/donald-trump-jr-russia-email-candidacy.html [with comments]
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Jim Dalrymple II
@JimDalrympleII
Full statement Donald Trump Jr's attorney sent to BuzzFeed News in response to tonight’s NYT story on Jr’s meeting/email
10:27 PM - 10 Jul 2017
https://twitter.com/JimDalrympleII/status/884599915980013568 [with comments]
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The Stories On Don Jr.’s Russia Meeting Were A "Bat Signal" For Trump’s Base
The MAGA crowd fiercely defended the eldest Trump son in a way they haven’t for other members of Trump’s inner circle, including Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.
July 10, 2017
https://www.buzzfeed.com/tariniparti/the-stories-on-don-jrs-russia-meeting-were-a-bat-signal-for [with comments]
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Sebastian Gorka on Trump Jr. Controversy: 'Massive Nothing Burger'
MSNBC Live with Stephanie Ruhle
7/11/17
Sebastian Gorka, Deputy Assistant to President Trump, told MNSBC's Stephanie Ruhle that the controversy surrounding Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Russian attorney is a "massive nothing burger." Duration: 15:51
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-news/watch/sebastian-gorka-on-trump-jr-controversy-massive-nothing-burger-992659523584 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gYELqoNOMY [with comments] [and again, see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=129013931 and preceding and following]
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HEATED: CNN Alisyn Battles Sebastian Gorka over 'Fake News' Trump - Russia Collusion on New Day 7/11/2017
Published on Jul 11, 2017 by Live Stream TV News [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxoADTw18wjYQKGHiV2ea-Q , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxoADTw18wjYQKGHiV2ea-Q/videos ]
[unofficial upload for the moment at least at] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yMoQWY4SSw [with comments] [no official upload (yet) available at https://www.youtube.com/user/CNN/videos ] [and again, see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=129013931 and preceding and following]
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Donald Trump Jr.
@DonaldJTrumpJr
Here's my statement and the full email chain
11:00 AM - 11 Jul 2017
https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/884789418455953413 [with (over 7,000) comments] [posted by Trump Jr. knowing the NYT article next below was about to be published, as it was just minutes later]
Donald Trump Jr.
@DonaldJTrumpJr
Here is page 4 (which did not post due to space constraints).
11:01 AM - 11 Jul 2017
https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/884789839522140166 [with (over 9,000) comments] [posted by Trump Jr. knowing the NYT article next below was about to be published, as it was just minutes later]
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Russian Dirt on Clinton? ‘I Love It,’ Donald Trump Jr. Said
Video [embedded]:
Follow Donald Trump Jr.'s Russia Email Trail
Donald Trump Jr. received an email on June 3, 2016, promising dirt on Hillary Clinton. The information was described as being part of Russia's support for his father’s presidential bid. His reply? “I love it.”
By Drew Jordan on Publish Date July 11, 2017.
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000005250366/donald-trump-jr-russia-emails.html [no official YouTube (yet) available at https://www.youtube.com/user/TheNewYorkTimes/videos ]
Document:
Read the Emails on Donald Trump Jr.’s Russia Meeting
The text of email correspondence setting up a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Kremlin-connected lawyer in chronological order.
JULY 11, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/11/us/politics/donald-trump-jr-email-text.html
Graphic:
How Key Trump Associates Have Been Linked to Russia
Several are under scrutiny by the F.B.I. and Congress.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/07/us/politics/trump-russia-flynn-kushner.html
By JO BECKER, ADAM GOLDMAN and MATT APUZZO
JULY 11, 2017
The June 3, 2016, email sent to Donald Trump Jr. could hardly have been more explicit: One of his father’s former Russian business partners had been contacted by a senior Russian government official and was offering to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Hillary Clinton [ http://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/hillary-rodham-clinton ].
The documents “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” read the email, written by a trusted intermediary, who added, “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
If the future president’s eldest son was surprised or disturbed by the provenance of the promised material — or the notion that it was part of a continuing effort by the Russian government to aid his father’s campaign — he gave no indication.
He replied within minutes: “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”
Four days later, after a flurry of emails, the intermediary wrote back, proposing a meeting in New York on Thursday with a “Russian government attorney.”
Donald Trump Jr. agreed, adding that he would most likely bring along “Paul Manafort (campaign boss)” and “my brother-in-law,” Jared Kushner, now one of the president’s closest White House advisers.
On June 9, the Russian lawyer was sitting in the younger Mr. Trump’s office on the 25th floor of Trump Tower, just one level below the office of the future president.
Over the past several days, The New York Times has disclosed the existence of the meeting [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html (in full above)], whom it involved and what it was about. The story has unfolded as The Times has been able to confirm details of the meetings.
But the email exchanges, which were reviewed by The Times, offer a detailed unspooling of how the meeting with the Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, came about — and just how eager Donald Trump Jr. was to accept what he was explicitly told was the Russian government’s help.
The Justice Department and the House and Senate Intelligence Committees are examining whether any of President Trump’s associates colluded with the Russian government to disrupt last year’s election. American intelligence agencies have determined that the Russian government tried to sway the election in favor of Mr. Trump.
The precise nature of the promised damaging information about Mrs. Clinton is unclear, and there is no evidence to suggest that it was related to Russian-government computer hacking that led to the release of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails [ https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/us/politics/dnc-wikileaks-emails-fundraising.html ]. But in recent days, accounts by some of the central organizers of the meeting, including Donald Trump Jr., have evolved or have been contradicted by the written email records.
After being told that The Times was about to publish the content of the emails, instead of responding to a request for comment, Donald Trump Jr. posted images of them on Tuesday on Twitter [just above].
“To everyone, in order to be totally transparent, I am releasing the entire email chain of my emails” about the June 9 meeting, he wrote. “I first wanted to just have a phone call but when that didn’t work out, they said the woman would be in New York and asked if I would meet.”
He added that nothing came of it. But in an interview on Tuesday with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, he said that “in retrospect, I probably would have done things a little differently.”
At a White House briefing earlier Tuesday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy press secretary, referred questions about the meeting to Donald Trump Jr.’s counsel, but read a statement from the president in which he called his son “a high-quality person.”
The back story to the June 9 meeting involves an eclectic cast of characters the Trump family knew from its business dealings in Moscow.
The initial email outreach came from Rob Goldstone [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/us/politics/rob-goldstone-russia-trump.html ], a British-born former tabloid reporter and entertainment publicist who first met the future president when the Trump Organization was trying to do business in Russia.
In the June 3 email, Mr. Goldstone told Donald Trump Jr. that he was writing on behalf of a mutual friend, one of Russia’s biggest pop music stars, Emin Agalarov. Emin, who professionally uses his first name only, is the son of Aras Agalarov, a real estate tycoon sometimes called the “Donald Trump of Russia.”
The elder Mr. Agalarov boasts close ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia: His company has won several large state building contracts, and Mr. Putin awarded him the Order of Honor of the Russian Federation.
Rob Goldstone’s facebook page shows he checked in to Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, “preparing for meeting.”
Mr. Agalarov joined with the elder Mr. Trump to bring the Miss Universe contest [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/us/politics/how-trumps-miss-universe-in-russia-became-ensnared-in-a-political-inquiry.html ] to Moscow in 2013, and the Trump and Agalarov families grew relatively close.
When Emin released a music video with a theme borrowed from the television show “The Apprentice,” Mr. Trump, then the show’s star, made a cameo appearance, delivering his trademark line: “You’re fired!” The elder Mr. Agalarov had also partnered with the Trumps to build a Trump hotel in Moscow, but the deal never came to fruition.
“Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting,” Mr. Goldstone wrote in the email. “The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.”
He added, “What do you think is the best way to handle this information and would you be able to speak to Emin about it directly?”
There is no such title as crown prosecutor in Russia — the Crown Prosecution Service is a British term — but the equivalent in Russia is the prosecutor general of Russia.
That office is held by Yury Yakovlevich Chaika, a Putin appointee who is known to be close to Ms. Veselnitskaya.
Arranging a Meeting
After sending back his reply of “I love it especially later in the summer” — when voters’ attention would be heightened by the approaching election — Donald Trump Jr. arranged to speak with Emin, sending along his private cellphone number on June 6.
“Ok he’s on stage in Moscow but should be off within 20 Minutes so I’m sure can call,” Mr. Goldstone wrote at 3:43 p.m.
Within the hour, Donald Trump Jr. had responded: “Rob thanks for the help. D.”
The next day, Mr. Goldstone followed up: “Don Hope all is well Emin asked that I schedule a meeting with you and The Russian government attorney who is flying over from Moscow for this Thursday. I believe you are aware of this meeting — and so wondered if 3pm or later on Thursday works for you?”
Mr. Goldstone’s emails contradict statements he made in his interview with The Times on Monday, when he said that he did not know whether the elder Mr. Agalarov had any role in arranging the meeting, and that he had no knowledge of any official Russian government role in the offer to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Mrs. Clinton. Instead, he said that Ms. Veselnitskaya had contacted Emin directly, and that Emin had asked him to reach out to the Trumps as a favor to her.
“I actually asked him at one point how he knew her, and he said, ‘I can’t remember but, you know, I know thousands of people,’” he said in the interview.
Subsequent efforts to reach Mr. Goldstone, who acknowledged in the interview that he had spoken with someone at the Trump Organization over the weekend in anticipation of news media attention, have been unsuccessful.
Mr. Goldstone, in a June 7 follow-up email, wrote, “I will send the names of the two people meeting with you for security when I have them later today.”
By that time, as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Mr. Trump was already under the protection of the Secret Service and access to Trump Tower in New York was strictly controlled. Ms. Veselnitskaya told The Times that the person who accompanied her was an interpreter whom she declined to name.
After being informed that the Russian lawyer could not make the 3 p.m. time that had been proposed, and agreeing to move it by an hour, Donald Trump Jr. forwarded the entire email chain to Mr. Kushner’s company work email, and to Mr. Manafort at his Trump campaign email.
“Meeting got moved to 4 tomorrow at my offices,” he wrote on June 8. “Best, Don.”
Mr. Kushner recently disclosed the fact of the meeting, though not the content, in a revised form on which all those seeking top secret security clearances are required to list contacts with foreign government officials and their representatives. The Times reported in April [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/us/politics/jared-kushner-russians-security-clearance.html ] that he had failed to list his foreign contacts [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/us/politics/senate-jared-kushner-russia.html ], including with several Russians; his lawyer has called those omissions an error.
Mr. Manafort also disclosed that a meeting had occurred, and that Donald Trump Jr. had organized it, in response to one of the Russia-related congressional investigations.
Representatives for both men did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Ms. Veselnitskaya arrived the next day and was ushered into Donald Trump Jr.’s office for a meeting with what amounted to the Trump campaign’s brain trust.
Besides having politically connected clients, one of whom was under investigation by federal prosecutors at the time of the meeting, Ms. Veselnitskaya is well known for her lobbying efforts against the Magnitsky Act [ https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/hr6156 ], a 2012 law that punishes designated Russian human rights abusers by allowing the United States to seize their assets and keep them from entering the country. The law so angered Mr. Putin that he retaliated [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/world/americas/kremlin-adoptions-sanctions-russia.html ] by barring American families from adopting Russian children. Her activities and associations have brought her to the attention of the F.B.I., according to a former senior law enforcement official.
When first contacted by The Times on Saturday, Donald Trump Jr. portrayed the meeting this way: “It was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow-up.”
Responding to Queries
The next day, after The Times informed him that it was preparing an article that would say that the meeting also involved a discussion about potentially compromising material on Mrs. Clinton, he issued another statement: “I was asked to have a meeting by an acquaintance I knew from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant with an individual who I was told might have information helpful to the campaign. I was not told her name prior to the meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to attend, but told them nothing of the substance.”
He continued: “After pleasantries were exchanged, the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information. She then changed subjects and began discussing the adoption of Russian children and mentioned the Magnitsky Act. It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting.”
Mr. Goldstone recalled the meeting in much the same way.
Ms. Veselnitskaya offered “just a vague, generic statement about the campaign’s funding and how people, including Russian people, living all over the world donate when they shouldn’t donate” before turning to her anti-Magnitsky Act arguments, he said. “It was the most inane nonsense I’ve ever heard.”
Ms. Veselnitskaya, for her part, said in an statement to The Times sent this past weekend that “nothing at all about the presidential campaign” had been discussed at the Trump Tower meeting, adding that she had “never acted on behalf of the Russian government” and that she had “never discussed any of these matters with any representative of the Russian government.” She has not responded to requests for comment since.
A spokesman for Mr. Putin said on Monday that he did not know Ms. Veselnitskaya and that he had no knowledge of the June 2016 meeting.
Back in Washington, both the White House and a spokesman for President Trump’s lawyer have taken pains to distance the president from the meeting, saying that he did he not attend it and that he learned about it only recently, a point Donald Trump Jr. reiterated Tuesday in his interview on Fox News.
Mr. Agalarov did not respond to a request for comment.
Emin, the pop star at the center of it all, will not comment on the matter, either, Mr. Goldstone, his publicist, said on Monday. “Emin said to me that I could tell journalists that, you know, he has decided to go with just a straight no comment,” Mr. Goldstone said. “His reasoning for that is simply that he believes that by him commenting in any way from Russia, it once again will open this debate of Trump, Trump, Russia. Now here’s another person from Russia. Now he’s another person from Russia. So he wants to just not comment on the story. That’s his reasoning. It’s — the story will play out however it plays out.”
Sophia Kishkovsky contributed reporting.
Related Coverage:
Russian Hacking and Influence in the U.S. Election
Complete coverage of Russia’s campaign to disrupt the 2016 presidential election.
https://www.nytimes.com/news-event/russian-election-hacking
Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian Lawyer: The Story Behind the Story
A Russian lawyer was said to have dirt on Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump Jr. agreed to meet her. The tale of the email.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/us/politics/russia-trump-emails.html
How Trump’s ‘Miss Universe’ in Russia Became Ensnared in a Political Inquiry
JULY 11, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/us/politics/how-trumps-miss-universe-in-russia-became-ensnared-in-a-political-inquiry.html
A Conspiracy of Dunces
JULY 11, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/opinion/trump-russia-collusion.html
Mini-Donald’s Major Fail
JULY 11, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/opinion/donald-trump-jr.html
Rancor at White House as Russia Story Refuses to Let the Page Turn
JULY 11, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/us/politics/russia-trump.html
With Glare on Trump Children, Political Gets Personal for President
JULY 12, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/us/politics/trump-says-son-is-innocent-amid-reports-of-russia-meeting.html
Rob Goldstone, Trump Intermediary, Likes Silly Hats and Facebook
JULY 12, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/style/rob-goldstone-russia-trump.html
© 2017 The New York Times Company
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/us/politics/trump-russia-email-clinton.html [with (over 5,000) comments], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuZUNjFsgS8 [as embedded; with comments]
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Trump Teased ‘Major’ News On Clinton Hours After Don Jr. Set Meeting On Russian Dirt
“I think you’re going to find it very informative and very, very interesting.”
07/11/2017 Updated July 12, 2017
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-clinton-don-jr-russia_us_596562fee4b09b587d633d10 [with (separate) embedded video, and comments], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFIZ80Oqxxo [embedded; with comments]
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New details emerge on Moscow real estate deal that led to the Trump-Kremlin alliance
Donald Trump, Aras Agalarov and Rob Goldstone.
(Photos: Sean Gallup/Getty Images; Sergei SavostyanovTASS via Getty Images; Adriel Reboh/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
By Michael Isikoff
July 11, 2017
While in Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant in November 2013, Donald Trump entered into a formal business deal with Aras Agalarov, a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin, to construct a Trump Tower in the Russian capital. He later assigned his son, Donald Trump Jr., to oversee the project, according to Rob Goldstone, the British publicist who arranged the controversial 2016 meeting between the younger Trump and a Kremlin-linked lawyer.
Trump has dismissed the idea he had any business deals in Russia, saying at one point last October, “I have nothing to do with Russia.”
But Goldstone’s account, provided in an extensive interview in March in New York, offers new details of the proposed Trump project that appears to have been further along than most previous reports have suggested, and even included a trip by Ivanka Trump to Moscow to identify potential sites.
According to the publicist, the project — structured as a licensing deal in which Agalarov would build the tower with Trump’s name on it — was only abandoned after the Russian economy floundered. The economic downturn resulted in part from sanctions imposed by the U.S. and the European Union following Russia’s intervention in Ukraine.
Goldstone’s version of events implies a possible explanation for Trump’s interest in lifting sanctions on Russia — a policy move his administration quietly pursued in its first few weeks [ https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-administrations-secret-efforts-ease-russia-sanctions-fell-short-231301145.html ] until it ran into strong opposition from members of Congress and officials within the State Department.
Goldstone placed Donald Trump Jr. at the center of the Trump Tower deal, saying that his father assigned his eldest son the job of moving the project to fruition after the signing of a “letter of intent” between the Trump Organization and Agalarov’s company, the Crocus Group. It is not clear if the future president personally signed the “letter of intent,” but Michael Cohen, a longtime lawyer for Trump, told Yahoo News Tuesday that it would have been standard practice for Trump, as president of the Trump Organization, to do so.
Donald Trump Jr. at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, July 18, 2016.
(Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Goldstone also said that Ivanka Trump flew to Moscow in 2014 and met with Emin Agalarov, the oligarch’s son, a pop singer and a vice president of the Crocus Group, to identify sites for the project. Confirming Goldstone’s account, Mother Jones [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/07/the-trump-russia-conspiracy-is-now-very-simple/ ] late Tuesday published a photo of Ivanka Trump and Emin Agalarov in Moscow in Feb. 2014.
Trump “put Donald Jr. in charge and then Ivanka went to Moscow to look around for what the location would be,” Goldstone said. But the plans for a Trump Tower fell apart because “the economy tanked in Russia’’ after the imposition of Western sanctions, he said.
Goldstone, a British-born publicist who once did worked for Michael Jackson, represents Emin Agalarov in his music career and was present in Moscow during the Miss Universe pageant when the Trump Tower project was discussed by Trump and Aras Agalarov. His role has gotten new attention this week after the New York Times disclosed that Goldstone emailed Donald Trump Jr. in June 2016 urging him to meet with a Russian lawyer to receive damaging information from the Russian government about Hillary Clinton.
Trump Jr. released his email exchange with Goldstone on Tuesday, confirming the key role of the publicist and, more significantly, the Agalarovs, in offering negative information about Clinton on behalf of the Kremlin. “Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting,” Goldstone wrote Trump Jr. on June 3, 2016.
A chief prosecutor in Russia “offered to provide the Trump campaign some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and would be very useful to your father. This is very high-level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support of Mr. Trump — helped along by Aras and Emin.”
Alan Garten, the chief lawyer for the Trump Organization, did not respond to requests for comment. In a telephone interview, Cohen, who is Trump’s personal lawyer, did not dispute any specific details of Goldstone’s account but offered to check them. He did not later respond. But Cohen adamantly rejected the idea there was anything improper about meeting with the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, given that Trump Jr. was told she might have information helpful to Trump’s campaign. “The purpose of the election is to win,” said Cohen, adding, “Why is this any different?” than the unverified “dossier” on Trump’s ties to Russia prepared by a former British spy working for a Washington research firm hired by his political opponents.
Trump Jr., accompanied by then campaign manager Paul Manafort and senior adviser Jared Kushner, met with the Russian lawyer at Goldstone’s request to review the information she purported to have. “He met with her face-to-face to determine” the validity of the advertised documents and “no information was provided.”
Goldstone had played a key role in helping to broker the initial decision by the Miss Universe pageant — then owned by the Trump Organization and NBC — to hold its 2013 contest [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/07/how-a-music-publicist-connected-trumps-inner-circle-to-a-russian-lawyer-peddling-clinton-dirt/ ] in Moscow.
According to Goldstone, he pitched the idea to Paula Schugart, then chief executive of Miss Universe, as a way to promote the music career of Emin Agalarov. Schugart was initially hesitant because of concerns about red tape in Moscow. “What if you had a partner who owns the biggest venue in Moscow?” Emin Agalarov responded, according to Goldstone’s account. “Between myself and my father, we can cut through the red tape. You have a new partner.”
The plans to bring Miss Universe to Moscow was announced by Trump in Las Vegas in June 2013 during the Miss USA contest. Trump at the time quickly expressed hope that it would lead to a meeting with Putin. “Do you think Putin will be going to the Miss Universe pageant in November in Moscow — if so, will he become my new best friend?” Trump had tweeted at the time.
A meeting with Putin never came off during Trump’s Moscow trip; the Kremlin expressed regret that the Russian president wouldn’t be able to fit it into his schedule on the day in question because he had a meeting with the King of Holland. But the trip gave Trump an opportunity to discuss the plans for the Trump Tower in Moscow with Agalarov, a billionaire who has been called “the Trump of Russia” and “Putin’s builder” because of massive construction projects he has done on behalf of the Kremlin. Just 10 days before the Miss Universe pageant, Putin had given Agalarov a prestigious award at a ceremony at the Kremlin: Order of Honor of the Russian Federation.
In an interview with Forbes [ https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2017/03/20/russian-billionaire-family-trump-ties-ongoing/ ] this March, Emin Agalarov confirmed the plans for Trump Tower in Moscow. “We thought that building a Trump Tower next to an Agalarov tower — having the two big names — could be a really cool project to execute,” Emin Agalarov told the magazine. Agalarov blamed the abandonment of the project on Trump’s decision to run for president, rather than the imposition of sanctions. “He ran for president, so we dropped the idea,” Agalarov said. “But if he hadn’t run, we would probably be in the construction phase today.”
But Emin Agalarov said he and the now president have continued to stay in touch, saying that Trump sent a handwritten note to the Agalaovs in November after they congratulated him on his victory. “Now that he ran and was elected, he does not forget his friends.”
Read more:
Pence distances himself from Trump Jr. revelations
https://www.yahoo.com/news/pence-distances-self-trump-jr-revelations-173223677.html
Copyright 2017 Yahoo News
https://www.yahoo.com/news/new-details-emerge-moscow-real-estate-deal-led-trump-kremlin-alliance-190126219.html [with (approaching 10,000) comments]
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6 things to watch for next in the Donald Trump Jr. saga
1) Rob Goldstone seemed to casually mention the Russian government's support for Trump, and Trump Jr. didn't remark on it. Why?
2) Who is the “Crown prosecutor of Russia”?
3) How close is Veselnitskaya to the Kremlin?
4) Did Trump Jr. talk to Agalarov about his information?
5) Did this information ever get disclosed to the president?
6) Do Democrats intensify talk of collusion, conspiracy, soliciting foreign contributions, treason, impeachment or all of the above?
July 11, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/11/6-things-to-watch-for-next-in-the-donald-trump-jr-saga/ [with embedded video, and comments]
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The Everybody-Does-It Defense of Collusion
After months of vehement denials, Trump supporters and surrogates are trying a new tack: If collusion occurred, it was no big deal.
Jul 11, 2017
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/the-everybody-does-it-defense-of-collusion/533325/ [with comments]
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‘Category 5 hurricane’: White House under siege by Trump Jr.’s Russia revelations
By Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker
July 11, 2017 Updated July 11, 2017
The White House has been thrust into chaos after days of ever-worsening revelations about a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a lawyer characterized as representing the Russian government, as the president fumes against his enemies and senior aides circle one another with suspicion, according to top White House officials and outside advisers.
President Trump — who has been hidden from public view since returning last weekend from a divisive international summit — is enraged that the Russia cloud still hangs over his presidency and is exasperated that his eldest son and namesake has become engulfed by it, said people who have spoken with him this week.
The disclosure that Trump Jr. met with a Russian attorney, believing he would receive incriminating information about Hillary Clinton as part of the Kremlin’s effort to boost his father’s candidacy, has set back the administration’s faltering agenda and rattled the senior leadership team.
Even supporters of Trump Jr. who believe he faces no legal repercussions privately acknowledged Tuesday that the story is a public relations disaster — for him as well as for the White House. One outside ally called it a “Category 5 hurricane,” while an outside adviser said a CNN graphic charting connections between the Trump team and Russians resembled the plot of the fictional Netflix series “House of Cards.”
Even Vice President Pence sought to distance himself from the controversy, with his spokesman noting that Trump Jr.’s meeting occurred before Pence joined the ticket.
Inside a White House in which infighting often seems like a core cultural value, three straight days of revelations in the New York Times about Trump Jr. have inspired a new round of accusations and recriminations, with advisers privately speculating about who inside the Trump orbit may be leaking damaging information about the president’s son.
This portrait of the Trump White House under siege is based on interviews Tuesday with more than a dozen West Wing officials, outside advisers, and friends and associates of the president and his family, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid.
The makeup of Trump’s inner circle is the subject of internal debate, as ever. Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and senior adviser; Jared Kushner, her husband and another senior adviser; and first lady Melania Trump have been privately pressing the president to shake up his team — most specifically by replacing Reince Priebus as the White House chief of staff, according to two senior White House officials and one ally close to the White House.
The three family members are especially concerned about the steady stream of unauthorized leaks to journalists that have plagued the administration over the nearly six months that President Trump has been in office, from sensitive national security information to embarrassing details about the inner workings of the White House, the officials said.
Stephanie Grisham, the first lady’s communications director, said: “Of course, the first lady is concerned about leaks from her husband’s administration, as all Americans should be. And while she does offer advice and perspectives on many things, Mrs. Trump does not weigh in on West Wing staff.”
Lindsay Walters, a deputy White House press secretary, disputed reports about Priebus’s standing. “These sources have been consistently wrong about Reince, and they’re still wrong today,” she said.
White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner walk together during the Congressional Picnic on the South Lawn of the White House on June 22.
(Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
After this story first published, Josh Raffel, a White House spokesman, said in a statement on behalf of Kushner and Ivanka Trump: “Jared and Ivanka are focused on working with Reince and the team to advance the President’s agenda and not on pushing for staff changes.”
Trump recently publicly praised Priebus’s work ethic, and the chief of staff’s allies note that Priebus has done as good a job as can be expected under the unique circumstances of this administration. Defenders of Priebus have long said they expect him to make it to a year in the position, and Trump is said to be hesitant to fire him or any other senior staffer amid the escalating Russia investigation led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
The mind-set of Trump Jr. over the past few days has evolved from distress to anger to defiance, according to people close to him. He hired a criminal defense attorney but maintains that he is innocent of any wrongdoing. After his tweets commenting on the matter drew scrutiny, he agreed to his first media interview — with his friend Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity on his show on Tuesday night.
One friend of Trump Jr.’s said the presidential son saw the Hannity appearance as an opportunity to give his version of Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” speech, a 1952 address in which the then-vice-presidential candidate defended himself against accusations of financial improprieties.
Trump has had no public events since returning Saturday night from Germany but has been closely monitoring developments with his eldest son in the news.
Trump continues to view the Russia controversy as an excuse used by Democrats for losing an election they thought they would win — and an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of his victory, aides said. They said that the president’s frustration is based on the media coverage of his son’s actions, as opposed to the actions themselves.
“He just looks at this as the continuum of taking a group of unrelated facts and putting them together in concentric circles and saying, ‘Aha — look what happened!’ ” said Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a longtime friend of the president who was chairman of the Presidential Inaugural Committee. “With Don Jr., whatever set of facts there are may not lead to the conclusion that the establishment media is making.”
Trump and his advisers are deeply frustrated that the disclosure by Trump Jr. has overshadowed the positive coverage they expected to receive from the president’s trip abroad, as well as other issues they hoped to spotlight this week, such as the Senate health-care bill and trade.
A handful of Republican operatives close to the White House are scrambling to Trump Jr.’s defense and have begun what could be an extensive campaign to try to discredit some of the journalists who have been reporting on the matter.
Their plan, as one member of the team described it, is to research the reporters’ previous work, in some cases going back years, and to exploit any mistakes or perceived biases. They intend to demand corrections, trumpet errors on social media and feed them to conservative outlets, such as Fox News.
But one outside adviser said a campaign against the press when it comes to Trump Jr.’s meeting could be futile: “The meeting happened. It’s tough to go to war with the facts.”
In the West Wing, meanwhile, fear of the Mueller probe effectively paralyzed senior staffers as they struggled to respond.
No official has yet delivered a robust defense of Trump Jr., although Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the principal deputy press secretary, told reporters Monday, “I would certainly say Don Jr. did not collude with anybody to influence the election.”
At Tuesday’s press briefing, Sanders read a brief statement from the president — “My son is a high-quality person and I applaud his transparency” — but declined to speak further on the issue, referring all questions to Trump Jr.’s attorney.
Other senior White House officials were hesitant to talk about Trump Jr. — even on the condition of anonymity — for fear of exposing themselves legally.
Some top officials, as well as outside advisers, had earlier suggested that the White House conduct its own internal review to identify any potential problem areas related to Russia so that it can release the information on its own rather than be caught unaware by news reports. But that notion went nowhere, in part because officials were afraid to discuss any potential Russia interactions that could make them targets of Mueller’s probe.
One White House official went so far as to stop communicating with the president’s embattled son, although this official spoke sympathetically about his plight, casting Trump Jr. as someone who just wants to hunt, fish and run his family’s real estate business.
“The kid is an honest kid,” said one friend of Trump Jr. “The White House should’ve never let that story go out on the president’s son.... What he’s upset about was that it was a minor meeting and the media glare — anything that’s Russia-related, gets picked up the way roaches get caught in a roach motel.”
Eric Trump, another son of the president, defended his older brother Tuesday night by retweeting a message [ https://twitter.com/EricTrump/status/884897415010041857 ] from British politician Nigel Farage, who said Trump Jr. was under attack because he is “the best public supporter” of the president. Eric Trump tweeted: “This is the EXACT reason they viciously attack our family! They can’t stand that we are extremely close and will ALWAYS support each other.”
Critics of Trump Jr. counter that he should have known better than to accept a meeting with someone who was explicitly described in an email as a “Russian government attorney.”
“It wasn’t naivete,” said Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia in the Obama administration. “It was, ‘Oh, they have some dirt on our opponent and I’m eager to receive it.’ Nobody thought to think, ‘Well, how did they obtain that? Is this coming from the Russian government, Russian intelligence?’ Those are the kinds of obvious questions that should have been asked, in my opinion.”
Pence found out about Trump Jr.’s meeting with the Russian attorney Friday evening in advance of the first Times story, said one person familiar with the discussions. Both Pence and his team view the Russia coverage as a distraction, and are working to keep the vice president clear of it and focused on Trump’s policy goals — such as health care, the subject of his scheduled visit to Kentucky on Wednesday.
“The vice president is working every day to advance the president’s agenda, which is what the American people sent us here to do. The vice president was not aware of the meeting,” Pence’s press secretary, Marc Lotter, said in a statement. “He is not focused on stories about the campaign, particularly stories about the time before he joined the ticket.”
On Capitol Hill — where Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced Tuesday that he is delaying his chamber’s August recess by two weeks — Republican senators were becoming increasingly frustrated with the White House, which they blame for Congress’s inability to pass any major legislation.
A growing number of senators believe that the widening Russia probe — as well as the Trump-fueled tumult that seems to dominate nearly every news cycle — have stalled their legislative agenda, leaving them nothing to offer their constituents by way of achievements when they head home over the break.
Read more:
Donald Trump Jr. was told campaign meeting would be with ‘Russian government attorney,’ according to emails
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/donald-trump-jr-was-told-campaign-meeting-would-be-with-russian-government-lawyer-according-to-emails/2017/07/11/70b957e2-664c-11e7-9928-22d00a47778f_story.html
The Take: Trump Jr.’s emails offer a revelation unlike any other in the Russia probe
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-revelation-unlike-any-other-in-the-russia-investigation/2017/07/11/7985fa14-666b-11e7-8eb5-cbccc2e7bfbf_story.html
Donald Trump Jr. may have crossed the legal line on collusion
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/11/donald-trump-jr-may-have-just-crossed-the-legal-line-on-collusion/
Trump Jr. could be in legal jeopardy, but analysts said more would be required for a criminal case
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-jrs-emails-could-put-him-in-legal-jeopardy-but-more-would-be-required-for-criminal-case-analysts-say/2017/07/11/02985360-6653-11e7-8eb5-cbccc2e7bfbf_story.html
Donald Trump Jr.’s emails about the meeting with a Russian lawyer, annotated
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/11/donald-trump-jr-s-emails-about-meeting-a-russian-government-attorney-annotated/
Russian lawyer who met with Trump Jr. has long history fighting sanctions
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/russian-lawyer-who-met-with-trump-jr-has-long-history-fighting-sanctions/2017/07/11/05e2467c-65b1-11e7-94ab-5b1f0ff459df_story.html
Assessing how ‘open’ and ‘transparent’ Donald Trump Jr. was in his Hannity appearance
July 12, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/07/12/assessing-how-open-and-transparent-donald-trump-jr-was-in-his-hannity-appearance/
‘You may actually learn a thing or two’: Sean Hannity’s message to the media, annotated
July 12, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/12/you-may-actually-learn-a-thing-or-two-sean-hannitys-message-to-the-media-annotated/
© 2017 The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/category-5-hurricane-white-house-under-siege-by-trump-jrs-russia-revelations/2017/07/11/1e091478-664d-11e7-8eb5-cbccc2e7bfbf_story.html [with embedded video, and (over 13,000) comments], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puNQMJmWk7o [with comments], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExcDi9a9His [with comments], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmHkYcRI-hk [with comments], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZpGc7zTS-E [with comments]
*
Why Donald Trump's Russia Denials Can No Longer Be Believed
His son’s attempt to get dirt on Hillary Clinton shows the president to be either deeply clueless about his own campaign, or a shameless liar.
Jul 12, 2017
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/why-donald-trumps-russia-denials-cannot-be-believed/533376/ [with comments]
Trump says son is 'innocent' over emails about Russian campaign help
July 12, 2017
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-statement-idUSKBN19X19C
Exclusive: Trump says he was unaware of son's meeting with Russian lawyer
July 12, 2017
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-interview-idUSKBN19X2XF
When a Witch Hunt Finds Real Witches
Let’s take another look at Donald Trump Jr.’s email traffic, shall we?
July 12, 2017
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/12/when-a-witch-hunt-finds-real-witches-215368 [with comments]
In Trump's Ohio bastion, supporters dismiss uproar over Donald Jr.
July 12, 2017
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-ohio-idUSKBN19X2TN
The Latest: Trump wishes he’d asked Putin who he supported
Jul 12, 2017
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on the controversy surrounding a meeting last summer between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer promising damaging information on Hillary Clinton (all times local):
8:30 p.m.
President Donald Trump says there’s one question he wishes he would have asked Russian President Vladimir Putin during their meeting in Germany last week: “Were you actually supporting me?”
That’s what Trump tells Reuters in a White House interview Wednesday before departing for Paris, France.
U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that Russia meddled in the 2016 election in order to bolster Trump’s candidacy and weaken his rival, Hillary Clinton.
But Trump is doubting that conclusion. He says that his commitment to building up the military and increasing U.S. energy production stand opposed to Putin’s aims.
He says: “It’s really the one question I wish I would have asked Putin: Were you actually supporting me?”
Trump also insists the White House “is functioning beautifully” despite what he calls a “hoax made up by the Democrats".
* * *
8:30 p.m.
President Donald Trump is refusing to dispute Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assertion that Trump believed him when he said that Russia didn’t meddle in the 2016 election during their meeting last week.
Asked in an interview with Reuters Wednesday whether he believed Putin, Trump continued to question the conclusion of U.S. intelligence officials that Russia meddled to help Trump win.
He says: “Look. Something happened and we have to find out what it is, because we can’t allow a thing like that to happen to our election process.”
But he added of Putin: “Somebody did say if he did do it you wouldn’t have found out about it. Which is a very interesting point.”
Still Trump insists that “There was zero coordination” between his campaign and Russia,” adding: “It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
* * *
[...]
https://www.apnews.com/00ca32fc6f024c81b19a638c99572e7b/The-Latest:-Trump-wishes-he'd-asked-Putin-who-he-supported
*
HEATED INTERVIEW: Anderson Cooper GRILLS Trump Lackey Sebastian Gorka on Trump & Russia
Published on Jul 12, 2017 by Dose of Dissonance [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv7bObYhwkJQM9dSelNbRNQ , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv7bObYhwkJQM9dSelNbRNQ/videos ]
FULL INTERVIEW: CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360" - JULY 12, 2017. Anderson Cooper grills Trump's Sebastian Gorka on Trump & Russia.
Anderson Cooper to White House official: 'I'm just going to ignore the insults'
July 13, 2017 Updated July 13, 2017
http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/13/politics/cooper-gorka-exchange-trump-jr-emails-cnntv/index.html [with embedded video]
[unofficial upload for the moment at least at] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxcidbnqOzs [with comments] [no official upload (yet) available at https://www.youtube.com/user/CNN/videos ] [and again, see also in particular (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=129013931 and preceding and following]
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Hannity: Collusion outrage is pointed in wrong direction
Published on Jul 12, 2017 by Fox News
The double standard and hypocrisy is disgusting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1vvzxf8PIA [with comments]
Gingrich: Will Mueller investigate Democrats and Ukraine?
Published on Jul 12, 2017 by Fox News
Former House speaker weighs in on allegations of collusion on 'Hannity'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOWuaqAaGYc [with comments]
Gingrich slams House, Senate GOP handling of investigations
Published on Jul 12, 2017 by Fox News
Former House speaker accuses top Republicans of 'sleepwalking' on 'Hannity'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS4_nDjxvlE [with comments]
Conway speaks out about 'actual' examples of collusion
Published on Jul 12, 2017 by Fox News
Senior counselor to President Trump reacts to Donald Trump Jr.'s interview on 'Hannity'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT99KiOLg0s [with comments]
*
Bungled collusion is still collusion
By Charles Krauthammer
July 13, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bungled-collusion-is-still-collusion/2017/07/13/68c7f72a-67f3-11e7-8eb5-cbccc2e7bfbf_story.html [with embedded video, and comments] , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdojX5iBH7Q [with comments]
An administration without a conscience
By Michael Gerson
July 13, 2017
Given what we know about the collusion — and there is no other word for it — between then-candidate Donald Trump’s most senior advisers and what they thought was a Kremlin-tied lawyer offering dirt [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/is-donald-trump-jrs-i-love-it-email-a-smoking-gun-or-a-distraction/2017/07/11/be6af2d8-666b-11e7-a1d7-9a32c91c6f40_story.html ] on Hillary Clinton, the most shocking thing is that no one on the Trump side was shocked. The most offensive thing is that no one took offense. Trump’s son, son-in-law and campaign manager treated the offer of aid by a hostile foreign power to tilt an election as just another day at the office. “I think many people would have held that meeting,” the president affirmed [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/07/12/i-think-many-people-would-have-held-that-meeting-trump-says-of-sons-huddle-with-russian-lawyer/ ]. It is the banality of this corruption that makes it so appalling. The president and his men are incapable of feeling shame about shameful things.
Donald Jr. certainly doesn’t know what all the fuss is about. Instead of offering a hint of contrition, he offered a complaint that the proffered information was not particularly useful. “I applaud his transparency,” father said of son [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/07/12/president-says-donald-trump-jr-is-open-transparent-and-innocent/ ]. But disclosure is not really a virtue if you are admitting highly unethical actions without apology. It is more like the public confession of serious wrongdoing, and the attempted normalization of sliminess.
The ultimate explanation for this toxic moral atmosphere is President Trump himself. He did not attend the meeting, but he is fully responsible for creating and marketing an ethos in which victory matters more than character and real men write their own rules. Trumpism is an easygoing belief system that indulges and excuses the stiffing of contractors, the conning of students, the bilking of investors, the exploitation of women and the practices of nepotism and self-dealing. A faith that makes losing a sin will make cheating a sacrament.
Republicans have sometimes employed the excuse that members of the Trump team are new to politics — babes in the woods — who don’t yet understand all the ins and outs. Their innocence, the argument goes, is proved by their guilt. This might apply to minor infractions of campaign finance law. It does not cover egregious acts of wrongdoing. Putting a future president in the debt of a foreign power — and subject, presumably, to blackmail by that power — is the height of sleazy stupidity. It is not a mistake born of greenness; it is evidence of a vacant conscience.
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/in-trumps-world-innocence-is-proved-by-guilt/2017/07/13/07e69a82-67ea-11e7-8eb5-cbccc2e7bfbf_story.html [with embedded videos, and comments]
*
Kushner pushed for more aggressive defense of Trump Jr. meeting
Trump’s son-in-law has urged the press shop to go into combat mode over the latest Russia scandal twist.
07/13/2017 Updated 07/13/2017
Jared Kushner has been pressing other White House aides to more vigorously defend the meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Kremlin-linked lawyer that Kushner also attended, but has faced resistance from some of Trump’s top press aides, according to six sources familiar with the matter.
Four White House officials and two outside advisers say Kushner wants the White House to more aggressively push out surrogates and talking points to change the narrative around the latest twist in the Russia scandal. Kushner has said the meeting, which has also further dragged him into the controversy, has a direct impact on Trump's presidency, even if Trump wasn't aware of it at the time.
But some of the communications aides, including press secretary Sean Spicer, and other senior staffers have expressed reservations. They say it’s best to leave it to outside counsel to handle the furor around Trump Jr., and fear inviting further legal jeopardy if Trump aides and allies more forcefully defend a meeting that they don’t fully know the details of, according to the sources.
The disagreement over strategy illustrates the White House’s ongoing struggle to cope with a quickly evolving scandal that has engulfed Trump’s early presidency. West Wing aides have had little control as Trump himself has appeared to exacerbate the Russia controversy, including by firing FBI Director James Comey. Some top advisers also have been blindsided by new developments, such as the Russian lawyer meeting during the height of the campaign.
After hours of little defense from the White House on Tuesday following Trump Jr.’s release of the email chain setting up the controversial meeting, Kushner spoke with Spicer and deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. During the conversation, Spicer and Sanders made the case for crafting a longer-term battle strategy, according two White House officials and an outside adviser familiar with the conversation, but Kushner called for full-on combat, according to a White House official.
A source close to Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a top White House adviser, said that while he doesn’t have an exact plan for an overall Russia response, he was angry that there wasn’t a more robust effort from the communications team. Kushner wanted them to complain about chyrons on cable news, call reporters to update stories with White House statements, and unleash surrogates immediately. He was angry that there were no talking points offered to surrogates, the source said. One senior administration official suggested that two aides from the communications shop be dedicated to updating chyrons.
"Jared didn’t like the idea, he wanted people to get aggressive,” said an outside adviser who was briefed on the meeting. "Jared’s the guy who is rushing the front lines, and other people are saying, 'See, wait, hold, and let’s get a battle strategy.'”
"Jared wanted to get surrogates, he wanted an op-ed in The [Wall Street] Journal and The [New York] Times, and we said, ‘Wait, we have to talk through how that will play out. Who is going to say it, who is going to put their name on the op-ed and what baggage do they have?’" the outside adviser also said.
While some in the White House have argued that this is an outside legal issue since Trump Jr. does not work in the White House, Kushner has said if the story affects the president, it's a White House issue.
The White House disputed that Kushner had a conversation directly complaining to top communications officials about the Russia scandal defense.
"These conversations simply did not happen and Jared did not raise a single one of these points besides saying thank you to everyone for their continued hard work," the White House said in a statement attributed to Spicer, Sanders, spokesman Josh Raffel and other White House aides including Raj Shah, Jessica Ditto and Lindsay Walters.
[...]
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/07/13/kushner-pushed-aggressive-defense-russia-meeting-240535 [with comments]
*
Trump Jr. pitch was part of broad Russian effort
07/13/17
Two months before Donald Trump Jr.’s encounter with a Russian figure, a key House subcommittee chairman received a similar overture in Moscow offering derogatory information about a U.S. policy that was upsetting Vladimir Putin.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican with a reputation as a Moscow ally in Congress, told The Hill the information he received in April 2016 came from the chief prosecutor in Moscow and painted an alternative picture of the Russian fraud case that led to the passage of anti-Russia legislation in Congress known as the Magnitsky Act.
[...]
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/341946-trump-jr-pitch-was-part-of-broad-russian-effort [with embedded video, and (approaching 6,000) comments]
*
Sources: Trump lawyers knew of Russia emails back in June
President Donald Trump and son Donald Trump Jr.
(Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Alex Brandon/AP, Matt York/AP)
By Michael Isikoff
July 13, 2017 Updated July 14, 2017
President Trump’s legal team was informed more than three weeks ago about the email chain showing that his son Donald Jr. met with a Kremlin-connected lawyer last June, two sources familiar with the handling of the matter told Yahoo News.
Trump told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday that he learned just “a couple of days ago” that his son, Donald Trump Jr, had met with the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya [ https://www.yahoo.com/news/natalia-veselnitskaya-russian-lawyer-met-donald-trump-jr-231050033.html ], after receiving emails that she would supply him with information that “would incriminate Hillary” and was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” That was the day after Donald Jr. released [ https://www.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-trump-says-unaware-sons-meeting-russian-lawyer-212645133.html ] the email exchanges himself, after learning they would be published by the New York Times.
Trump repeated that assertion in a talk with reporters Air Force One on his way to Paris Wednesday night. “I only heard about it two or three days ago,” he said according to a transcript of his talk when asked about the meeting with Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in June 2016 attended by Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign chief, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
But the sources told Yahoo News that Marc Kasowitz, the president’s chief lawyer in the Russia investigation, and Alan Garten, executive vice president and chief legal officer of the Trump Organization, were both informed about the emails in the third week of June, after they were discovered by lawyers for Kushner, who is now a senior White House official.
On June 8, 2016, Trump Jr. had forwarded an email [ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/11/us/politics/donald-trump-jr-email-text.html ] to Kushner and Manafort about the upcoming meeting with the subject line: “FW: Russia-Clinton-private & confidential.”
The discovery of the emails prompted Kushner to amend his security clearance form to reflect the meeting, which he had failed to report when he originally sought clearance for his White House job. That revision — his second — to the so-called SF-86 [ https://www.opm.gov/forms/pdf_fill/sf86-non508.pdf ], was done on June 21. Kushner made the change even though there were questions among his lawyers whether the meeting had to be reported, given that there was no clear evidence that Veselntiskya was a government official. The change to the security form prompted the FBI to question Kushner on June 23, the second time he was interviewed by agents about his security clearance, the sources said.
But the information that Trump’s lawyers were told about the emails in June raises questions about why they would not have immediately informed the president. Trump’s campaign is under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into possible collusion with Russian government officials. The emails appear to be the first hard evidence of contacts between top campaign officials and someone connected to the Kremlin.
A spokesman for Kasowitz declined to comment, saying the matter involved “privileged information.” Garten did not respond to an email request for comment.
Pushing back the discovery of the emails to June 21 also raises additional questions about the initial public statements made by the White House after the existence of the meeting was first reported by the New York Times on July 8. At that time, Trump, Jr. issued a public statement [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html ] describing the session as a “short introductory meeting” in which the primary topic of discussion was “the adoption of Russian children” by American families.” The actual purpose of the meeting, to obtain damaging information about Hillary Clinton ostensibly collected by the Russian government, wasn’t mentioned in Trump’s initial statement.
The next day, Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, said in an interview [ http://www.politico.com/story/2017/07/09/priebus-trump-big-nothing-burger-240328 ] that the meeting was a “big nothing burger.”
The president himself repeatedly described the Russia investigation as “fake news” and ridiculed television networks’ reports about it. “With four months looking at Russia…under a magnifying glass, they have ‘zero tapes’ of T people colluding. There is no collusion & no obstruction. I should be given an apology!” the president wrote in two tweets [ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/879323238425395200 , https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/879324620159160322 ] on June 26.
Aside from questions about the credibility of White House statements, the disclosure of the emails potentially has raised new questions about Kushner’s security clearance. He initially filed his SF-86 on Jan. 18, leaving out any mention of meetings with foreign government officials during the transition and the campaign. His lawyers have said this was inadvertent and that a member of his staff had prematurely hit the “send” button for the firm before it was completed. Within twelve hours, they have said, Kushner notified the FBI that he would make amendments and disclose his meetings with foreign officials.
This was followed by a revised security clearance submission on May 11 in which Kushner reported more than 100 meetings with officials from over 20 countries, including a meeting with the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and another with Sergey Gorkov, the head of Russian state-owned bank [ http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/02/politics/jared-kushner-russian-banker-what-we-know/index.html ].
The revised security clearance led to Kushner’s first FBI interview about the matter in mid-May, the sources said. The bureau is now reviewing Kushner’s second amended form following the new disclosure about his meeting with the Russian lawyer. His lawyers are confident that it won’t raise any additional problems since, as they have asserted, Kushner had forgotten the meeting — he was only briefly present — and had no intent to conceal it. In the meantime, he has an interim security clearance.
Copyright 2017 Yahoo News
https://www.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/sources-trump-lawyers-knew-russia-emails-back-june-000320831.html [with (over 7,000) comments]
*
Neither Trump nor the GOP will recover anytime soon
By Jennifer Rubin
July 14, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/07/14/neither-trump-nor-the-gop-will-recover-anytime-soon/ [with embedded video, and comments]
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Former Soviet Counterintelligence Officer at Meeting With Donald Trump Jr. and Russian Lawyer
by Ken Dilanian, Natasha Lebedeva and Hallie Jackson
Jul 14 2017, 9:35 am ET
WASHINGTON — The Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. and others on the Trump team after a promise of compromising material on Hillary Clinton was accompanied by a Russian-American lobbyist — a former Soviet counterintelligence officer who is suspected by some U.S. officials of having ongoing ties to Russian intelligence, NBC News has learned.
The lobbyist, first identified by the Associated Press as Rinat Akhmetshin, denies any current ties to Russian spy agencies. He accompanied the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, to the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower attended by Donald Trump Jr.; Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law; and Paul Manafort, former chairman of the Trump campaign.
Born in Russia, Akhmetshin served in the Soviet military and emigrated to the U.S., where he holds dual citizenship. He did not respond to NBC News requests for comment Friday, but he told the AP the meeting was not substantive. “I never thought this would be such a big deal, to be honest,” he told the AP.
He had been working with Veselnitskaya on a campaign against the Magnitsky Act, a set of sanctions against alleged Russian human rights violators. That issue, which is also related to a ban on American adoptions of Russian children, is what Veselnitskaya told NBC News she discussed with the Trump team.
But, given the email traffic suggesting the meeting was part of a Russian effort help Trump’s candidacy, the presence at the meeting of a Russian-American with suspected intelligence ties is likely to be of interest to special counsel Robert Mueller and the House and Senate panels investigating the Russian election interference campaign.
As has been previously reported, the meeting was set up by music publicist Rob Goldstone, who told Donald Trump Jr. in an email chain that Veselnitskaya has "information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father."
Goldstone called Veselnitskaya a "Russian government attorney" — though she disputes that — and said the information was "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump.”
The Associated Press quoted Akhmetshin [ https://apnews.com/dceed1008d8f45afb314aca65797762a/Russian-American-lobbyist-says-he-was-in-Trump-son's-meeting ] saying that Veselnitskaya brought with her to the meeting a plastic folder with printed-out documents that detailed what she believed was a flow of illicit funds to the Democratic National Committee.
The lobbyist said Veselnitskaya presented the contents of the documents to the Trump team, suggesting it could help the Trump campaign, he said.
“This could be a good issue to expose how the D.N.C. is accepting bad money,” The AP quoted Akhmetshin recalling her saying.
Veselnitskaya told a slightly different story in her interview with NBC News.
She said she brought with her a two-page document, one small part of which involved alleged D.N.C. funding issues. Most of it involved allegations against the Magnitsky sanctions, she said.
Donald Trump Jr., she said, asked if she had any further supporting documents.
“He clearly asked me if I had any financial records to back and support the idea that some funds from illegal sources went to DNC, went to Hilary Clinton," she told NBC News. “In reply to that, I told him that not only I don't have any financial records of that time — there was no chance that I could somehow, anyhow, have such records.”
She added that Trump Jr. ended the meeting by saying, “Well, the story that you've told us, it sounds very interesting but unfortunately at the moment, there is nothing that we, we can help you with about it. But maybe if we come to power, maybe one day, we will get back to you on that, because it really sounds interesting.”
Contacted by NBC News, representatives for Kushner and Manafort declined to comment.
On April 4, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter [ https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2017-04-04%20CEG%20to%20DHS%20(Akhmetshin%20Information)%20with%20attachment.pdf ] to the Homeland Security department seeking information about Akhmetshin, saying that Akhmetshin admitted to being a Soviet counterintelligence officer.
Grassley said Akhmetshin had failed to register as a foreign agent even though he had been lobbying in the U.S. for Russian interests. Grassley also charged that Akhmetshin had been working with Fusion GPS, an opposition-research firm that had compiled a highly disputed dossier on Donald Trump.
Fusion GPS has also worked on the campaign to raise questions about the story behind the Magnitsky Act.
Alan Futerfas, the attorney retained by Donald Trump Jr., told NBC News two other people accompanied Veselnitskaya to the meeting — someone Futerfas described as a translator and someone he described as a "friend of Emin [Agalarov]’s and maybe as a friend of Natalia [Veselnitskaya]’s.”
Futerfas said he has talked with that individual. "He is a U.S. citizen. He told me specifically he was not working for the Russian government, and in fact laughed when I asked him that question.”
It was not clear whether Futerfas was referring to Akhmetshin.
Agalarov is a pop star and a client of Rob Goldstone [ http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/rob-goldstone-man-behind-trump-jr-meeting-music-publicist-ties-n781931 ], a music publicist who arranged the meeting with Trump Jr. Agalarov appeared in a music video with Trump [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuZUNjFsgS8 (embedded in the fullpost above of the NYT article "Russian Dirt on Clinton? ‘I Love It,’ Donald Trump Jr. Said")] when the Miss Universe pageant, which Trump owned at the time, was held in Moscow in 2013.
Futerfas confirmed that, “for the purpose of security or otherwise, the names were reviewed” but said Trump Jr. knew nothing about the man's background at the time of the meeting.
When asked about whether he had concerns, knowing what he knows now, Futerfas responded: “I have absolutely no concerns about what was said in that meeting.”
Veselnitskaya, in an exclusive interview with NBC News [ http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russian-lawyer-who-met-trump-jr-i-didn-t-have-n781631 ], denied having any connection to the Kremlin and insisted the meeting was to discuss sanctions, not the presidential campaign.
In an email exchange released by Trump Jr. [ http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-jr-tweets-his-emails-led-russia-meeting-n781736 ], the president's eldest son wrote "I love it" to Goldstone when told about possibly getting his hands on material potentially damaging to the Clinton campaign.
Goldstone told Trump Jr. that the meeting would be with a "Russian government attorney" and that the information was "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." Trump Jr. responded enthusiastically, "If it's what you say I love it especially later in the summer."
Trump Jr. said after releasing the emails that, "in retrospect, I probably would have done things a little differently."
President Trump has defended his son's decision [ http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-defends-son-s-meeting-russian-lawyer-n782606 ] to meet with Veselnitskaya, saying "most people would have taken that meeting."
"My son is a wonderful young man. He took a meeting with a Russian lawyer, not a government lawyer but a Russian lawyer," Trump said Thursday in a joint press conference in Paris with French President Emmanuel Macron. "From a practical standpoint most people would have taken that meeting. It's called opposition research or research into your opponent."
Ken Dilanian and Natasha Lebedeva reported from Washington. Hallie Jackson reported from Paris.
©2017 NBCNews.com
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/russian-lawyer-brought-ex-soviet-counter-intelligence-officer-trump-team-n782851 [with embedded videos]
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Russian Lawyer Who Trump Jr. Met Says She Was in Contact With Top Russian Prosecutor
Natalia Veselnitskaya, the lawyer who Donald Trump Jr. met with in June 2016, spoke to journalists in Moscow on Tuesday.
Photo: Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press
[ https://apnews.com/bfd966c5f3354a4d8a650129eca35deb ]
In interview, Natalia Veselnitskaya says she talked with Kremlin-appointed official about U.S. sanctions law
By Brett Forrest and Paul Sonne
July 14, 2017 4:23 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON—The Russian lawyer [ https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-jr-met-russian-lawyer-who-claimed-to-have-helpful-campaign-information-1499646830 ] whom Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort met last year with the hopes of receiving damaging information about Hillary Clinton says she talked with the office of Russia’s top prosecutor while waging a campaign against a U.S. sanctions law and the hedge-fund manager who backed it.
Lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya said she wasn’t working for Russian authorities, but she said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that she was meeting with Russian authorities regularly, and shared information about the hedge-fund manager with the Russian prosecutor general’s office, including with Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika, a top official appointed by the Kremlin.
“I personally know the general prosecutor,” Ms. Veselnitskaya said. “In the course of my investigation [about the fund manager], I shared information with him.”
Mr. Chaika’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment on whether he knows and received information from Ms. Veselnitskaya.
President Donald Trump and others have stressed that she wasn’t formally working for the Russian government at the time of the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower. Mr. Trump said on Thursday at a news conference in Paris [ https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-defends-sons-decision-to-meet-with-russian-lawyer-1499968541 ] that his son’s meeting was brief and uneventful. “He took a meeting with a Russian lawyer. Not a government lawyer, but a Russian lawyer,” Mr. Trump said.
Ms. Veselnitskaya says she was working to spread information about William Browder, the U.S.-born fund manager turned Kremlin critic, who lobbied for passage of a 2012 U.S. law that incensed Moscow. The law, known as the Magnitsky Act [ https://blogs.wsj.com/corruption-currents/2012/12/14/obama-signs-magnitsky-act-into-law/ ], sanctioned Russians accused of defrauding Mr. Browder’s firm in Russia out of $230 million and causing the death of his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who died in Russian custody.
Also working on the anti-Magnitsky Act effort was a former Soviet military serviceman turned U.S. lobbyist, Renat Akhmetshin, who told the Journal that he attended the meeting at Trump Tower. Mr. Akhmetshin’s presence at the meeting wasn’t previously disclosed by Donald Trump Jr. or the White House.
The multiyear saga between Russia and Mr. Browder has featured accusations of murder and fraud, extensive lobbying efforts on both sides, high-level court proceedings and public statements by Russian President Vladimir Putin suggesting Mr. Browder is a criminal. And now, the drama has extended to the Trump White House, which is already facing probes into the campaign’s relationship with Russia.
Mr. Browder, who has denied any wrongdoing, and federal prosecutors in the U.S. claim that Russian officials and people linked to Russian officials participated in the fraud against his fund.
Ms. Veselnitskaya says she is a former Moscow regional prosecutor turned private attorney, and represents Prevezon Holdings, a Cyprus-based hotel and real-estate group owned by Russian national Denis Katsyv. Mr. Katsyv’s father, Pytor, is a former top Moscow region official and vice president of state-owned Russian Railways. She says she was compiling information about Mr. Browder on behalf of Prevezon and met with the Trump camp to share her findings.
In 2014, Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, alleged that Prevezon laundered defrauded money from Mr. Browder’s fund into U.S. bank accounts and Manhattan real estate. Earlier this year, U.S. authorities and Prevezon reached a $5.9 million civil settlement. The company didn’t admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement.
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee this week asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions whether the Trump Tower meeting was in any way connected to the settlement, which came two months after President Trump fired Mr. Bharara.
A spokeswoman for the Justice Department didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Ms. Veselnitskaya also said that at the time of the Trump Tower meeting she was representing Aras Agalarov, the Russian-Azerbaijani property developer who organized the 2013 Miss Universe pageant with President Trump in Moscow. However, in email correspondence with Donald Trump Jr., a British publicist presented her as a Russian government lawyer, a description she said was a mischaracterization.
Through the publicist, Mr. Agalarov’s pop-star son Emin helped arrange Ms. Veselnitskaya’s meeting with Donald Trump Jr., one of various people she said she petitioned to assist in her effort to have the law repealed and discredit Mr. Browder.
Rob Goldstone, the British publicist who worked for the Agalarovs, wrote in an email to the president’s son that the elder Mr. Agalarov had met with Russia’s top prosecutor who offered to provide the Trump campaign incriminating information on Mrs. Clinton. Ms. Veselnitskaya says she asked the elder Mr. Agalarov for help in arranging a meeting with the Trump campaign but denies it was about Mrs. Clinton. Both Ms. Veselnitskaya and Mr. Agalarov deny the meeting was arranged at Mr. Chaika’s request.
“Natalia has done some real estate-related legal work for Mr. Agalarov’s company over the years,” said Scott Balber, an attorney representing the Agalarov family. He denied the elder Mr. Agalarov met with Mr. Chaika, the prosecutor general, as described in the email. Mr. Agalarov, speaking on Russian radio Wednesday, called the content of the correspondence “some kind of fiction.”
Asked whether Mr. Chaika requested or participated in arranging Ms. Veselnitskaya’s meeting in New York or met with Mr. Agalarov, the Russian prosecutor general’s office said it “does not exchange information and does not conduct any meetings at the international level outside the framework regulated by international legal agreements and Russian procedural legislation.”
Ms. Veselnitskaya saw the younger Mr. Trump and his colleagues in Trump Tower on June 9 of last year.
“By the time I stepped into the meeting room to talk with Donald Trump Jr., all I knew was that I approached the elder Mr. Agalarov with a request to help,” Ms. Veselnitskaya said. “And I knew his son Emin communicated with Donald Trump Jr.”
She said her meeting wasn’t coordinated with official Russian government structures. She did, however, share information similar to what the Russian prosecutor general’s office gave to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R., Calif.) in a Moscow meeting two months earlier. Namely, she said she wanted to inform the Trump campaign of allegations that an American firm Mr. Browder worked with, Ziff Brothers Investments, had dodged taxes in Russia and later donated to Democrats.
A spokesman for Ziff Brothers Investments declined to comment for this article.
“Both during the meeting, while I was talking to Donald Trump Jr., and in the written materials I prepared, I was trying to tell the story that I myself had personally investigated,” Ms. Veselnitskaya said, referring to Mr. Browder.
Donald Trump Jr. wasn’t satisfied with the quality of the information she provided. In an interview Tuesday with Sean Hannity on Fox News, the younger Mr. Trump said: “It was this, ‘Hey, some DNC donors may have done something in Russia and they didn’t pay taxes.’ I was like, ‘What does this have to do with anything?’”
Ms. Veselnitskaya said: “My expectation before the meeting was he read my letter of information, he got interested, and he was going to help me. His expectations were totally different, as I can understand now.”
Mr. Browder denies the accusations that Ms. Veselnitskaya and the prosecutor general’s office have been leveling against him. He calls them “stale and disproven” and says they’re part of a well-resourced, Moscow-coordinated campaign to undermine him and the Magnitsky Act. The law he helped get passed angered Kremlin authorities in part because it allowed the U.S. to add Russian human-rights violators easily to a U.S. sanctions list, even individuals who had no part in the Magnitsky case.
“They were on a major full-court press on all fronts with Congress, with the press … with Trump Jr.,” Mr. Browder said, describing Ms. Veselnitskaya as a critical part of the anti-Magnitsky Act effort. “I think that she’s working hand in glove with Chaika, and it’s all part of a coordinated strategy back at headquarters.”
The Russian prosecutor general’s office didn’t respond to a request for further comment.
Mr. Putin has called the Magnitsky Act “imperialist behavior” by the U.S. and said Russian authorities believe Mr. Browder himself broke the law. Mr. Putin denied that Russian authorities were criminally negligent in the death of Mr. Magnitsky.
“There was a tragedy,” Mr. Putin said in 2013. “What, in American prisons, no one ever dies or something?”
Mr. Browder filed a complaint with the Justice Department in July 2016 that accused Ms. Veselnitskaya and others of violating U.S. lobbying laws by pushing for a repeal of the Magnitsky Act without registering their activities properly with the Justice Department. He says he hasn’t received a response.
The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee is slated to hold a hearing later this month on violations of the lobbying law, known as the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Mr. Browder is scheduled to testify about the activities of Ms. Veselitskaya and others, the committee announced this week.
Christopher S. Stewart contributed to this article.
Copyright ©2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-lawyer-who-trump-jr-met-says-she-was-in-contact-with-top-russian-prosecutor-1500063809 [with embedded videos, and comments]
*
The Trump Family's Explanations Are Straining Credulity to Its Breaking Point
The story that Donald Trump Jr., his father, and their aides told about a June 9 meeting with a Russian lawyer made little sense—even before the latest revelations.
Jul 14, 2017
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/the-trump-familys-increasingly-implausible-explanations/533682/ [with comments]
Russian-American lobbyist joined Trump’s son’s meeting, too
In this photo taken July 11, 2017, Donald Trump Jr. is interviewed by host Sean Hannity on his Fox News Channel television program, in New York. A Russian-American lobbyist says he attended a June 2016 meeting with President Donald Trump’s son, marking another shift in the account of a discussion that was billed as part of a Russian government effort to help the Republican’s White House campaign.
Jul. 14, 2017
https://www.apnews.com/dceed1008d8f45afb314aca65797762a/Russian-American-lobbyist-joined-Trump's-son's-meeting,-too [with embedded video]
Russian-American at Trump Jr. meeting is ex-military officer
In this photo provided by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Rinat Akhmetshin is photographed at the Newseum in Washington, June 13, 2016 after a documentary screening. Rep. Adam Schiff, ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee says reports that a second Russian person was in a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. last summer “adds another deeply disturbing fact about this secret meeting.” Akhmetshin confirmed his participation to The Associated Press on Friday, July 14, 2017.
Jul. 14, 2017
https://www.apnews.com/135216fe8c2c459993d5f5740bc67c15/Russian-American-at-Trump-Jr.-meeting-is-ex-military-officer
Pop star, lobbyist: The cast of Trump Russia connections
In this file photo taken on Sunday, Nov. 10, 2013, Vice President of Crocus Group Emin Agalarov, left, Miss Universe 2013 Gabriela Isler, from Venezuela, center, and pageant owner Donald Trump, of the United States attend the final of the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, Russia. A billionaire real estate mogul, his pop singer son Emin Agalarov, a music promoter, a property lawyer and Russia’s prosecutor general are unlikely figures who surfaced in emails released by Donald Trump Jr. as his father’s presidential campaign sought potentially damaging information in 2016 from Russia about his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Jul. 14, 2017
https://www.apnews.com/c950bcf920ec4727b1087184b12ac222/Pop-star,-lobbyist:-The-cast-of-Trump-Russia-connections
Also At Trump Jr.-Russia Meeting: An Ex-U.S. Government Worker [translator] With Liberal Views
Investigators won’t say if they’ve spoken to Anatoli Samochornov, a witness to the event everyone is talking about.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/anatoli-samochornov-trump-jr-russia-meeting_us_5966ac00e4b0a8d46d11f69f [with embedded video, and comments]
Trump Tower Russia meeting: At least eight people in the room
July 14, 2017 Updated July 15, 2017
http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/14/politics/donald-trump-jr-meeting/ [with embedded video]
Evidence Suggests Russian Intelligence Pipeline To Trump Campaign
Days after Donald Trump Jr. reportedly received documents aiding his father’s campaign, hackers linked to Russian intelligence released similar material.
07/14/2017
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-jr-russian-intelligence_us_5969356ee4b0d6341fe8f28f [with embedded video, and comments]
‘Lie after lie after lie’: Fox News’s Shepard Smith has a Cronkite moment on Russia
"We’re still not clean on this, Chris [Wallace]. If there’s nothing there — and that’s what they tell us, they tell us there’s nothing to this and nothing came of it, there’s a nothingburger, it wasn’t even memorable, didn’t write it down, didn’t tell you about it, because it wasn’t anything so I didn’t even remember it — with a Russian interpreter in the room at Trump Tower? If all of that, why all these lies? Why is it lie after lie after lie? If you clean, come on clean, you know? My grandmother used to say when first we practice to — Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. The deception, Chris, is mind-boggling. And there are still people who are out there who believe we’re making it up. And one day they’re gonna realize we’re not and look around and go, Where are we, and why are we getting told all these lies?"
July 14, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/14/lie-after-lie-after-lie-fox-news-shepard-smith-has-a-cronkite-moment-on-russia/ [with embedded video, and (over 5,000) comments], [unofficial upload of the segment for the moment at least at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5LftyJmNtA (with comments)] [no official upload of the segment (yet) at https://www.youtube.com/user/FoxNewsChannel/videos ]
Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting sure sounds like a Russian intelligence operation
Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya fits the profile of someone who might serve as a “cut-out” or “access agent” sent to assess and test a high-priority target’s interest in cooperation.
By Rolf Mowatt-Larssen
Rolf Mowatt-Larssen is the director of the Intelligence and Defense Project at Harvard’s Belfer Center. He served for three years as director of intelligence and counterintelligence at the Department of Energy and for 23 years as a CIA intelligence officer in domestic and international posts.
July 14, 2017
Donald Trump Jr. is seeking to write off as a nonevent his meeting last year with a Russian lawyer who was said to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton. “It was such a nothing,” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity [ http://www.foxnews.com/transcript/2017/07/11/donald-trump-jr-on-hannity-in-retrospect-wouldve-done-things-differently.html ] on Tuesday. “There was nothing to tell.”
But everything we know about the meeting — from whom it involved to how it was set up to how it unfolded — is in line with what intelligence analysts would expect an overture in a Russian influence operation to look like. It bears all the hallmarks of a professionally planned, carefully orchestrated intelligence soft pitch designed to gauge receptivity, while leaving room for plausible deniability in case the approach is rejected. And the Trump campaign’s willingness to take the meeting — and, more important, its failure to report the episode to U.S. authorities — may have been exactly the green light Russia was looking for to launch a more aggressive phase of intervention in the U.S. election.
[...]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trump-jrs-russia-meeting-sure-sounds-like-a-russian-intelligence-operation/2017/07/14/5f7f3dfe-6762-11e7-9928-22d00a47778f_story.html [with embedded video, and comments]
Trump 2020 Campaign Paid $50,000 To Trump Jr.’s Lawyer Days Before Bombshell NYT Report
According to the disclosure forms, Trump’s presidential campaign gave the payment to Futerfas’ law firm more than a week before the story ran.
07/15/2017 Updated July 15, 2017
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-campaign-paid-retainer-to-trump-jrs-lawyer-eleven-days-before-bombshell-nyt-story_us_596a9a68e4b017418627f6eb [with embedded video, and comments]
Trump Goes on Attack as Russia Revelations Appear to Take Toll
President Trump on Saturday at Trump National Golf Club during the United States Women’s Open in Bedminster, N.J.
JULY 16, 2017
BEDMINSTER, N.J. — President Trump unleashed a new fusillade of tweets on Sunday morning, defending his son Donald Trump Jr., slashing the news media and tarring his long-vanquished opponent, Hillary Clinton.
After a leisurely Saturday afternoon spent at a women’s golf tournament at his club here, where he waved to the crowd from a glassed-in viewing stand, Mr. Trump awoke with a familiar list of grievances.
“HillaryClinton can illegally get the questions to the Debate & delete 33,000 emails but my son Don is being scorned by the Fake News media?” he tweeted [ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/886534810575020032 ] shortly before 7 a.m. Forty minutes later, he posted [ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/886544734788997125 ], “With all of its phony unnamed sources & highly slanted & even fraudulent reporting, #Fake News is DISTORTING DEMOCRACY in our country.”
In between those posts, Mr. Trump thanked people who had turned out to cheer him at the United States Women’s Open, which is being played at Trump National Golf Club despite calls from women’s groups for it to be moved because of his record of degrading behavior toward women.
A small knot of protesters formed Saturday afternoon as well, but the police kept them well away from the club. “Thank you to all of the supporters, who far out-numbered the protesters, yesterday at the Women’s U.S. Open,” Mr. Trump wrote [ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/886538703547621376 ]. “Very cool!”
Mr. Trump has gone through one of the rockiest stretches of his presidency since the disclosure of a meeting in June 2016 [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/us/politics/donald-trump-jr-russia-email-candidacy.html ] between his son and a Kremlin-linked lawyer. Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, also attended, as did a Russian-American lobbyist, Rinat Akhmetshin [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/14/us/politics/russian-american-lobbyist-meeting-trump.html ].
Besieged by the headlines about Russia and Mr. Trump’s eldest son, the White House planned to repackage the president’s economic message with a string of “theme weeks.” The first, this week, will be “Made in America,” focusing attention on American workers and goods they produce.
[...]
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/16/us/politics/trump-twitter-russia.html
No, Donald Trump Jr. Doesn’t Have a First Amendment Right to Get Freebies From the Russians
July 16, 2017
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/knocking-down-best-argument-in-defense-of-trump-jr.html [with comments]
Trump's lawyer let something slip about the Russia meeting that raises questions about whether Trump attended
Jul. 16, 2017
President Donald Trump's lawyer told ABC on Sunday morning [ http://www.businessinsider.com/jay-sekulow-secret-service-donald-trump-jr-2017-7 ] that Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting last June with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin was innocent because if it weren't, the Secret Service would not have "allowed these people in."
"I wonder why the Secret Service — if this was nefarious — why the Secret Service allowed these people in?" Sekulow told ABC's Jon Karl. "The president had Secret Service protection at that point, and that raised a question with me."
It is unclear why Sekulow assumed the Secret Service vetted people Trump Jr. met with. The Secret Service confirmed on Sunday [ https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/886674470118752256 ] that Trump Jr. was not under its protection on June 9, 2016, and "would not have screened anyone he [Trump Jr.] was meeting with at that time." Trump's campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner were not under Secret Service protection at that point, either, as Think Progress noted on Sunday.
The Secret Service would not have had to do a background check on the attendees beforehand since Trump was just a candidate at the time, former Secret Service agent Jonathan Wackrow told CNN on Sunday — only a physical sreening.
Indeed, Akhmetshin told Yahoo that "no one asked us for ID's" when he and Veselnitskaya entered Trump Tower. "We literally walked in," he said. He told the Washington Post in an earlier interview that Veselnitskaya only invited him to the meeting the day of.
Sekulow's comments about the Secret Service garnered widespread attention, and raised questions about whether Trump himself was present at the meeting he claimed to only have learned about last week. Emails released by Trump Jr. last Tuesday revealed he was offered dirt on Hillary Clinton by a "Russian government attorney" who wanted to meet with him to discuss it further. Trump Jr. agreed to the meeting, replying, "I love it."
According to media reports from that time, Trump was at Trump Tower at 4 p.m. while the meeting was taking place in his son's office. The only public event the then-candidate attended that day was a fundraising lunch for the Trump Victory Fund, CNN reported, and he was back at Trump Tower by 1 p.m.
[...
http://www.businessinsider.com/trumps-lawyer-jay-sekulow-russia-meeting-2017-7
Team Trump Excuses for the Don Jr. Meeting Go From Bad to Worse
The explanations and defenses have continued to change—and not for the better.
07.16.17
http://www.thedailybeast.com/team-trump-excuses-for-the-don-jr-meeting-go-from-bad-to-worse
A Russian Developer Helps Out the Kremlin on Occasion. Was He a Conduit to Trump?
Shortly before the Miss Universe pageant in 2013, President Vladimir V. Putin presented Mr. Agalarov with the Order of Honor, one of Russia’s highest civilian awards.
JULY 16, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/16/world/europe/aras-agalarov-trump-kremlin.html
*
and a flashback for a bit of compare and contrast:
THE 2000 CAMPAIGN: THE DEBATE; Gore Aide Receives, Then Lets Go Of Hot Potato
SEPT. 14, 2000
A close adviser to Vice President Al Gore said he had received an anonymously mailed package today that involved material designed to prepare Gov. George W. Bush for his debates with Mr. Gore.
The adviser, former Representative Tom Downey of Long Island, N.Y., said he examined the materials briefly before giving them to his lawyer, who turned them over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation this afternoon. Mr. Downey, who has been helping Mr. Gore prepare for the Bush debates and was standing in for Mr. Bush in mock debates, also said he would recuse himself from any further debate preparation.
The Bush and Gore campaigns are to meet on Thursday to negotiate the debate schedule. If the candidates adhere to a plan set up by a bipartisan commission, the first debate will be on Oct. 3 in Boston.
Campaign officials said they did not know if the materials sent to Mr. Downey had been stolen from the Bush campaign or were meant to trap the Gore adviser in some sort of dirty trick. Mr. Downey's lawyer, Marc Miller, said the material -- a videotape and a sheaf of papers -- arrived in an envelope postmarked Austin, Tex., where the Bush campaign has its headquarters.
The Gore campaign was eager to dissociate itself quickly from the incident. After Mr. Miller called the F.B.I., campaign officials alerted The Associated Press that the packet had arrived and provided a detailed time line of Mr. Downey's actions.
Mark Fabiani, a spokesman for Mr. Gore, said of Mr. Downey: ''He's being very careful and very prudent. He's handled this exactly right. No one can raise any questions about how it's being handled. What to make of it, I don't know.''
[...]
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/14/us/the-2000-campaign-the-debate-gore-aide-receives-then-lets-go-of-hot-potato.html
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this is part 4 of a 10-part post which proceeds (point arising on the given) day by (point arising on the given) day from July 5, 2017 through July 14, 2017 -- the preceding part is the post to which this is a reply; the next part is a reply to this post -- the following 'see also (linked in)' listing, updated for intervening posts along the way, is common to all 10 parts
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in addition to (linked in) the post to which this is a reply and preceding and (any future other) following, see also (linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=3967329 and preceding and following;
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earlier this string, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132785538 and preceding and following
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earlier this string, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131914404 and preceding and following,
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http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132880457 and preceding (and any future following),
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132907409 and preceding and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132907879 and preceding (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132887325 and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132894128 and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132895587 and preceding and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132913036 and preceding and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132922811 and preceding (and any future following),
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132975537 and preceding and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132976503 and preceding (and any future following),
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=133004015 and preceding and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=133015256 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132894908 and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132913703 (and any future following);
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132913704 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132915282 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132915549 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132915921 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132941439 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132945542 and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132974430 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=132990337 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=133009021 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=133033759 and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=133034197 and preceding and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=133044044 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=133047395 and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=133050696 and preceding (and any future following),
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=133050954 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=133048050 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=133058139 an following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=133068785 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=133066344 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=133067590 and following,
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=133067838 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=133072893 (and any future following)
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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