Don Jr. Meeting Came At A Seminal Moment In Russian Interference Story
By ALLEGRA KIRKLAND Published JULY 14, 2017 4:43 PM
President Donald Trump and his team are casting it as absurdly conspiratorial to suggest there was anything odd about his oldest son accepting a meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer last June, noting that Russia was not a major campaign issue at the time.
But a close look at the timeline suggests that Donald Trump, Jr. took a meeting billed as an opportunity to learn information obtained as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump” at a moment when his father was taking heat from his opponent for his sunny view of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and shortly before the Kremlin’s disinformation and targeted leaking campaign against the Democrats began in earnest.
“You have to understand, when that took place, this was before Russia fever,” Trump told Reuters on Wednesday. “There was no Russia fever back then, that was at the beginning of the campaign, more or less.”
Trump Jr. took a similar tack on Tuesday when he took the surprise step of releasing the email chain leading up to his June 2016 meeting with a woman described to him as a “Russian government lawyer” who was said to have “information that would incriminate Hillary” Clinton. “To put this in context, this occurred before the current Russian fever was in vogue,” Trump Jr. said in a statement accompanying the email release.
This version of events does not tell the whole story. The campaign had already been underway for a year, and the news was full of articles about Trump’s “bromance” with Putin prior to the Trump Tower meeting between Trump Jr., his brother-in-law Jared Kushner, then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, and lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin. Headlines declared that Putin had ordered state-owned U.S. media outlets like RT to promote Trump’s candidacy and tear down Clinton’s, and questions swirled about Trump advisers’ business connections in Russia.
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