A Dangle?

[bigtree]

Ken Dilanian‏ @KenDilanianNBC 21m21 minutes ago

Former spooks believe the lawyer was a dangle by Russians, to see how Team Trump would react. https://www.justsecurity.org/43009/media-questions-trump-jr-emails-meeting-russian-government-lawyer/

The media is, in large part, missing the point when it comes to the news about Donald Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Vesilnitskaya and should be steering instead to raising the right questions. It is difficult to conceive of a scenario in which a private citizen in Russia has access to derogatory information on a U.S. presidential candidate. The act of offering such information was likely, at minimum, a trial balloon, and at best (from Moscow’s perspective), a chance to pass certain information from an agent of the Russian government to the Trump campaign through the candidate’s campaign manager and son, thereby also implicating Donald J. Trump himself. This begs the most important questions: what did she offer in that meeting? How did Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort respond?

Vesilnitskaya may have had her own agenda in requesting a meeting with Trump. That part could be legitimate. But Russian intelligence practice is to co-opt such a person by arming them with secret intelligence information and tasking them to pass it to Trump’s people and get their reaction. Did Trump’s associates like it? Do they want more? Did they report it to U.S. authorities? The key point is that essentially no Russian citizen or lawyer has compromising material on Hillary Clinton which has not been supplied to them from Russian intelligence. The simple assertion that she had such information is tantamount to declaring that Vesilnitskaya was acting as agent of Russian government in this particular role. Couple that with the specific text of the email messages (full text) sent to Donald Trump Jr. to set up the meeting which described the material as coming from the Russian government. All the alarm bells should have been going off in Trump Tower when they received an email offering to provide “very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and it’s government’s support for Mr. Trump.” A later email refers to the “Russian government attorney who is flying over from Moscow.” Donald Trump Jr.’s response: he would include Manafort and Kushner in the meeting.

In sum, Vesilnitskaya’s advocacy of other causes is irrelevant to her mission on behalf of the Russian government. Based on what we now know, this interaction had all the hallmarks of an overture by Russian intelligence to the campaign, and it is utterly damning that Trump Jr. took the meeting, brought in Manafort and Kushner to the meeting, and none of them reported the events immediately to the FBI nor to U.S. authorities until very recently...


read more: https://www.justsecurity.org/43009/media-questions-trump-jr-emails-meeting-russian-government-lawyer/

...considering the flood of hacked emails Wikileaks released THREE DAYS after the meeting with the Russian govt. lawyer, Russia appears to have gotten a green light to proceed.

Add that to Trump's open and direct call, the next month... “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you can find the 33,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

[bigtree]

1. kick

[Hekate]

2. KnR, bigtree

[leftstreet]

3. DURec

Interesting!

Thanks for posting this

[Solly Mack]

4. K&R

[cwydro]

5. K and r. nt

[spanone]

6. makes sense....hook, line and sinker

my question is when did they come back to them ....that's the real visitation.

[canetoad]

7. Kick nt

[DefenseLawyer]

8. I don't believe for a minute that this was the 1st contact between the campaign & the Russians

Don Jr. is too stupid to be brought in on the ground floor of something like this, and Manafort already had strong Russian ties.

[bigtree]

9. pretty high level though with the trio Don Jr., Manafort, and Kushner attending

...and it appears to be at the beginning of what became a deluge of hacked emails favorable to Trump released to the public.

[DefenseLawyer]

10. Why was Paul Manafort managing the campaign in the 1st place?

I think he was chosen because of his Russian ties. That also happened in June of 2016, which makes me think there was already Russian coordination.

[bigtree]

11. Washington Monthly Why Was Paul Manafort Hired

to answer that, you might want to look at this:

Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly (often simply Black, Manafort) was a lobbying firm based in Washington, D.C.. Formed in 1980, it merged with Gold & Liebengood to form BKSH & Associates in 1996.

The firm was one of the first political consulting firms to work for Ronald Reagan’s presidential candidacy in 1980, and would later also have extensive connections to the presidential administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

The firm has represented, and lobbied the US Congress on behalf of, numerous foreign governments and heads of state from both representative democracies and unelected dictatorships including Mohamed Siad Barre of Somalia, dictator Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, dictator Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, and Jonas Savimbi of Angola. During the 1988 presidential campaign in the United States, it was disclosed that Black, Manafort retained the island nation of the Bahamas as a client at a time its leadership was being attacked for alleged ties to drug traffickers. BMSK officials insisted that they intended only to help the Bahamas obtain more United States aid for efforts to curb drug smugglers.

Domestically the firm has represented Bethlehem Steel and Tobacco Institute, and helped elect a slew of lawmakers—including Senators Phil Gramm, Jesse Helms, Charles McCurdy Mathias Jr., Arlen Specter, Paula Hawkins and David F. Durenberger, and worked on legislation that benefitted the firm’s clients.

The principals in this firm were:

Charles R. Black Jr.
Paul J. Manafort
Roger J. Stone
Peter G. Kelly
R. Scott Pastrick
James C. Healey
Lee Atwater


read: http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/03/22/why-was-paul-manafort-hired-in-the-first-place/

[DefenseLawyer]

12. That tells you the how, not the why

Roger Stone had been business partners with Manafort. That tells you how he gets connected to Trump, presumably through Roger Stone. But did you actually read the rest of the article? Oleg Deripaska, Viktor Yanukovych, Serhiy Lyovochkin, Konstantin Kilimnik... etc. etc. etc. That seems to have a lot more to do with why Manafort was installed, right as the collusion agreement fell into place.