Chase Donald Trump's Russia scandal way back to a beauty pageant and it starts to make real sense

[Judi Lynn]

Lucian K. Truscott IV, Salon LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV, SALON - COMMENTARY
07 MAR 2019 AT 00:04 ET

Do you remember where you were and what you were doing on June 15, 2013? Neither do I. But you can bet your last dollar that Donald Trump does, because he was in Las Vegas at his Miss USA pageant meeting with Aras Agalarov and his Russian pop-star son Emin about bringing Trump’s Miss Universe Pageant to Moscow later that year. Aras Agalarov, sometimes called the “Trump of Russia,” is a billionaire oligarch close to Vladimir Putin who runs a vast real estate empire, including the Crocus City development in Moscow.

Agalarov agreed to pay Trump more than $10 million for the right to put on the pageant in Crocus City later that year, but his is a name we wouldn’t learn of for another four years, until July of 2017, when it would be revealed that the Agalarov family was part of the connective tissue behind the infamous meeting in Trump Tower in June of 2016 which put together the top managers of Trump’s presidential campaign — Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner — with six Russians connected to the Russian government who had told Trump’s son that they had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton they wanted to share with the Trump campaign.

Donald Trump didn’t want us to know in June of 2016, and later in July of 2017 that his son, son-in-law, and campaign chairman were meeting with Russian nationals, which is why Trump and officials of the Trump campaign lied all the way through the campaign in 2016 that they had any contacts at all with Russians, and it’s why Trump himself lied after the Trump Tower meeting was revealed in 2017 when he personally dictated a statement released to the press describing the meeting as an inconsequential discussion about “adoption” rather than the discussion about Russian involvement in the Trump campaign that it was.

So let’s go back to that day in 2013 when Donald Trump first met with the man who would provide a conduit between the Russian government and Trump’s campaign. Let’s have a look at what Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin were up to before the 2016 presidential campaign was underway, long before Trump himself showed up on anyone’s radar as one of the Republicans who were beginning to think of running for president.

More:
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/03/chase-donald-trumps-russia-scandal-way-back-beauty-pageant-starts-make-real-sense/?utm_source=push_notifications

[Liberty Belle]

1. Good job connecting lots of dots in this piece.

[2naSalit]

2. K&R