The Trump Tower Meeting Was Seven Years Ago Today (with Cliff Schecter)
“If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”
At four o’clock in the afternoon of June 9, 2016—seven years ago today—Donald Trump, Jr. met at Trump Tower in Manhattan with the Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskya, who’d supposedly promised dirt on Hillary Clinton. Also in attendance were Paul Manafort, the chair of the Trump campaign; Jared Kushner, who was running the campaign’s social media operation; Rob Goldstone, a flamboyant British music publicist who used to write for the tabloids; Rinat Akhmetshin and Ike Kaveladze, two associates of Trump’s Azeri-Russian oligarch chum Aras Agalarov; and a Putin-picked translator, Anatoly Samochornov.
That meeting lasted for 20 minutes. For 15 of the 20 minutes, Veselnitskya bitched and moaned about the Magnitsky Act, the federal law passed in 2012 that authorizes the government to sanction foreign officials who are human rights offenders, freeze their assets, and ban them from entering the United States. She made it clear that she, and by extension Putin, was no fan of this piece of legislation. Because the Russian autocrat had responded to the Magnitsky Act by prohibiting American citizens from adopting children from Russian orphanages, it was later spun by the Trumps that the meeting was about “adoptions.”
This was not what Junior thought the meeting would be about. It was, he said later, a bait and switch.
And yet, at 4:40 in the afternoon of June 9, 2016—20 minutes after the reportedly disappointing-for-both-sides meeting ended—Candidate Donald Trump quote-tweeted Hillary Clinton’s “delete your account” tweet with this: “How long did it take your staff of 823 people to think that up—and where are your 33,000 emails that you deleted?”
This was Trump’s first mention of HRC’s 33,000 “missing” emails.
It would not be the last.
Indeed, from that moment forward, the notion that “Crooked Hillary” had done something shady with her emails took hold in the popular imagination. “But her emails” became a thing, a meme, a rightwing talking point, a media narrative, a front-page spread in the New York Times, and a federal investigation. And it wound up costing her the election.
Was Candidate Trump in Trump Tower seven years ago today? He was. He was holed up in an office with the feckless and forgettable Reince Priebus. Did he know about the meeting? Junior insists that he never told his father, before or after, and nobody else did either—although there are plenty of reasons to think that this isn’t true. Michael Cohen thought it was bullshit.
It was either 1) total coincidence that Trump tweeted about Hillary’s emails 20 minutes after the Russians left the building seven years ago today, or, 2) he took that tack because someone told him to. Someone who—and I’m just spitballin’ here—his son, son-in-law, and campaign chair had just met with.
Six weeks after the Trump Tower Meeting, when the topic of canoodling with the Russians was broached, Junior went into full gaslight mode: “I can’t think of bigger lies. But that exactly goes to show you what the DNC and what the Clinton camp will do. They will lie and do anything to win. . . . These lies and the perpetuating of that kind of nonsense to gain some political capital is just outrageous.”
We found out about the meeting in July of 2017. Junior made the cover of TIME magazine, under the clever headline: “RED-HANDED.” The Eldest Boy’s dipshit response to the email about HRC dirt—“If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”—was widely disseminated and rightly mocked. For a few hopeful days, the revelation looked like the sort of bombshell that might hamper, if not doom, Trump’s presidency. Even Hope Hicks thought so. Sadly, that did not come to pass. In a week or so, all of this was mothballed—I guess because a super exciting private server wasn’t involved. Junior skated.
Mueller, for his part, seemed to downplay the importance of the Trump Tower Meeting. Per his report: “On the facts here, the government would unlikely be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the June 9 meeting participants had general knowledge that their conduct was unlawful. The investigation has not developed evidence that the participants in the meeting were familiar with the foreign-contribution ban or the application of federal law to the relevant factual context. The government does not have strong evidence of surreptitious behavior or efforts at concealment at the time of the June 9 meeting.”
The suggestion that the dudes running a fucking presidential campaign would be blissfully unaware of laws preventing their candidate from receiving foreign aid is preposterous. Paul Manafort, who once brokered a contested Republican national convention, and worked in politics for decades, didn’t know the rules? Really? I find that hard to believe. I also find it vexing that ignorance of the law should safeguard Junior from indictment. But that’s how it went down. Aside from some uncomfortable interviews with Congressional investigators and federal prosecutors, there were zero consequences for any of the participants of that meeting. Like, none.
Seven years ago today, Trump and Russia collided. Seven years ago today, Trump debuted the idea of Hillary’s missing emails. Seven years ago today, a narrative was planted that wound up costing HRC the election.
Had the media been able to ferret out this don’t-call-it-collusion sooner, had the coverage of the “missing emails” not been so breathless and disproportionate to what actually happened, had the upstart detective novelist James Comey kept his yap shut about the investigation—or disclosed the much more serious investigation into Trump simultaneously—Donald Trump would never have been in the position to be indicted for conspiracy to obstruct, willful retention of national security documents, and making false statements.
Seven years is a long time to wait.
LISTEN TO THE PODCAST
S5 E15: The Trump Tower Meeting Was Seven Years Ago Today (with Cliff Schecter)
“If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” Seven years ago today, Donald Trump, Jr., held the infamous Trump Tower meeting with a Kremlin-connected attorney and other Russian proxies. Greg Olear and Cliff Schecter break down the Trump/Russia sit-down. Plus: golf for kids.
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Photo credit: Chris Breeze. Trump Tower, New York, 2017.
This is just one example of how the GOP has become the Warlock Party. The term may have become associated in Scotland with MALE WITCHES due to the idea that they had made pacts with Auld Hornie (my note: remember pussy grabbing and that horney old devil - Epstein ?) and thus had betrayed the Christian faith and broke their baptismal vows or oaths. Donald broke his promise and vows to the USA. He and his get, his associates deserve to be pants, socially and financially, stripped of their citizenship and expelled from the country permanently.
Volume 1 of the Mueller Report announced there was insufficient evidence to charge a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia to impact the 2016 election. But insufficient evidence is not the same as absence of evidence. Former Mueller top team member, Andrew Weismann, revealed Mueller supervising Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein did not permit Mueller et al to “follow the money.” Had the Muller team been able to do so, they might have been able to support the substantial charge of criminal conspiracy, and place it into their report. We are very aware the one constant driver in Trump’s life is money. Trump Junior once said the majority of their money came from Russia. Perhaps the real reason for the Trump Tower meeting was to secure money for “Trump Tower Moscow.”
Regardless and even though DOJ Policy precluded any prosecutorial action on such a charge while Trump was in office, it’s doubtful Trump would have been protected from a charge of criminal conspiracy once he was out of office.