Huge Piece of the Puzzle from the LA Times
(Then Trump fired Comey on May 9, 2017)
The Trump Tower
meeting at the center of the Russia investigation explained
Sub-headline:
“What happened when Don Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner took that
meeting?”
My introduction after reading this
article and I call it the Puzzle Pieces on the Table:
It is 100% the best reporting I
have seen on this subject. It is extremely detailed, very easy-to-read
(although complex overall to the novice eye), very comprehensive in scope and
content, and overall I have to say it has excellent sourcing that is easy to
verify as accurate (not “Fake or Made-up News” that the Trump side will surely
peddle), and it makes for a good read as they say.
I would add that details and timeline therein is super reporting with a
strong emphasis on “questions to be answered and resolved.”
This is very
long very detailed, but laid out to make it easy to follow at the same time.
I won’t copy and paste the whole article here – space considerations
and all. However, I do want to highlight a few items that I think are key and the
most-important parts at least from my reading.
Keep in mind that as noted
therein that the Mueller team is surely on top of this and a whole lot more
informed and detailed in their work than I am.
So, here are a few key parts that I
picked out to post as part of my intro.
Enjoy the whole article – it is surely
worth your time. Thanks in advance.
Vox.com intro: What really happened at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016? The
answer to this question could be the key to understanding whether Trump’s team
colluded with the Russians — or whether the whole Trump-Russia scandal really
is, as participants claim, “a nothing burger.” After receiving a promise of
incriminating information about Hillary Clinton plainly said to be from the
Russian government, two of Trump’s close family members and his campaign chief
agreed to take a meeting to discuss it. Donald Trump Jr. even wrote, “If it’s
what you say I love it.”
Viewed on its face, it looks a whole lot like
smoking-gun evidence of collusion.
Another possibility, though, is that the
currently known story about the meeting is at least in part a cover-up — one
that’s been coordinated by all the meetings’ participants, their attorneys, and
perhaps the president himself, to hide some more damning truth.
My key parts emphasized:
1. On June 29, 2016, Rob Goldstone emailed Dan Scavino,
the Trump campaign’s director of social media. “I’m following up on an email
[from] a while back of something I had mentioned to Don and Paul Manafort
during a meeting recently,” Goldstone wrote. He
said that Emin Agalarov and a contact at the Russian social media site VK
wanted to create a “Vote Trump 2016” page. At the time, Paul had said he would welcome it, and so I had
the VK folks mock up a basic sample page, which I am resending for your
approval now.”
2. On July 8, Trump headed back to the U.S. on
Air Force One from the G-20 (where he also met Putin). By then, the NY Times had sent a more specific
list of questions about the June meeting, and it was during the eight-hour
flight that the president and his team strategized about how to respond. By most accounts, it was the president himself who
demanded that his son’s statement portray the meeting as being about “Russian
adoptions” — omitting that it was set up to get dirt on Hillary Clinton.
And that is what Don Jr. did, as the Times published its first report
revealing the meeting.
3.
On July 9, the following day, Trump’s then-legal team spokesperson Mark Corallo
took a call with Trump and White House communications director Hope Hicks. Per a
recent Times report, Corallo now says he warned that documents revealing
the truth about the meeting would surface — but
Hicks responded that the emails “will never get out.” Corallo
says he quickly ended the conversation, worried about potential obstruction of
justice.
Then just hours later, the NY Times posted a follow-up story revealing that the meeting’s
purpose was to get “damaging information about Hillary Clinton.” Trump Jr. then
released a longer statement that’s mostly up to date with his current story but that still omitted the crucial fact that Goldstone
had emailed him that this dirt would be coming from the Russian government.
I call this part: Coordinated cover-up in progress –
to wit:
In the months since Don Jr.’s
tweets, the various attendees of the meeting have put forward similar accounts
about what actually happened during it — in Don Jr.’s testimony, in Jared Kushner’s public statement, in Natalia Veselnitskaya’s statements,
in a Rob Goldstone interview, and in statements by Ike Kaveladze’s lawyer.
Their story is essentially that it was a tremendously
strange screw-up — a comedy-of-errors-esque array of misunderstandings and
misrepresentations piled on top of each other that, by sheer happenstance,
ended up looking far more incriminating than they truly were.
Now I conclude with that – are we to believe or trust that version or where the facts will lead us - that still remains to be seen.
To
me, and I’m sure, to others, the Trump camp spin defies both belief and gravity.
So I’m sure you’ll stay tuned … this is a biggie as they say perhaps the biggest in all American history - and that is not merely hyperbole, either. We shall see.
As always, thanks for stopping by. Enjoy the whole Vox article.
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