On Saturday, The New York Times reported that Trump Jr. met with a Kremlin-connected lawyer at Trump Tower in early June 2016. Trump Jr. initially told the paper that the meeting had covered only a dispute over adoption related to the Magnitsky Act, an American law meant to punish the current Russian regime for human-rights abuses. But three unnamed White House aides briefed on the meeting later told the Times that Trump Jr. had taken the meeting after being promised damaging information about Clinton.
Trump Jr. then changed his story, claiming he’d been promised only information relevant to the campaign, by an intermediary he met at the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, owned by his father and hosted in Moscow. (The Washington Post later identified him as Rob Goldstone, a music publicist who said he was working on behalf of an unnamed Russian client.) Trump Jr. brought his brother-in-law Jared Kushner and then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort to the meeting. He said that attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya offered him damaging information about Hillary Clinton, but that when it became clear she did not have the goods, he ended the meeting.
In other words, Trump Jr. admitted (while acknowledging a prior lie) that he was open to receiving damaging information about Hillary Clinton from the Russian lawyer; he was just frustrated that she didn’t seem to have it. If there was no collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump inner circle, it was not because top Trump aides were against it.
Trump Jr. claims that Veselnitskaya provided no actual incriminating information about Clinton, but it’s impossible at this point to know whether this is true, especially given Trump Jr.’s unreliable accounts.
The revelation about the meeting with Veselnitskaya is the first concrete evidence of attempts at collusion during the presidential campaign. But it is also, crucially, an instance of the scandal reaching into Trump’s family—his closest ring of advisers. Previous stories showed that Michael Flynn, the fired national-security adviser, had lied to the public, the vice president, and probably the FBI about his conversations with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States and that Attorney General Jeff Sessions failed to disclose meetings with Russian officials during the campaign. Kushner failed to disclose meetings with Russians after the election when applying for security clearance. Manafort faces several investigations. (Another, lower-level aide, Carter Page, is under investigation for questionable ties to Russia as well.)
The family tie becomes important if Trump Jr.’s second account of his meeting is taken at face value, which is admittedly challenging. He wants the public to believe that he, Kushner, and Manafort met with a Russian who claimed to have damaging information about Trump’s opponent, but did not tell the candidate himself; that this happened even though Trump Jr. and Kushner are close to Trump Sr., and that Trump was at Trump Tower, the site of the meeting, that day, where he lunched with Manafort. In other words, it is difficult to believe that Donald Trump did not learn about the meeting soon after it happened. The president continues to question whether Russia really interfered in the election, so either he’s being disingenuous or his son and son-in-law have kept him in the dark. Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the president’s lawyer, said on Sunday that “the president was not aware of and did not attend the meeting.” (On Monday morning, the Kremlin also denied knowledge of the meeting.)
After the election, Kushner was named a senior aide to the president, and his wife Ivanka has since joined the administration as well. Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump were tapped to take over the family business in their father and sister’s absence, though there’s little indication Trump has actually withdrawn from his business.
Despite Trump Jr.’s suggestion that Veselnitskaya’s focus on the Magnitsky Act was a red herring, it seems plausible that the Russian government would have raised scrapping the law as part of a quid pro quo for information that would damage Clinton. Veselnitskaya raised adoption because Putin cut off all American adoption of Russian children as retribution for the law.
Trump’s modus operandi throughout his life has been to break rules and then beg forgiveness. His first brush with the spotlight came when the U.S. Department of Justice sued him for excluding black tenants from housing developments; Trump eventually settled, agreeing not to discriminate. He has followed this pattern ever since: When caught using junk bonds to finance a project he swore wouldn’t employ them; when his father gave him an illegal $3.5 million loan by buying chips at his casino; when he was caught committing securities violations and fined; when he employed unauthorized Polish immigrants to construct Trump Tower; and so on. If backed into a corner, Trump will litigate and, failing that, simply settle by paying money.
The president, a political newcomer, seems to be under the impression that he can do the same in his new line of work. But as I have written before, there’s no option to declare bankruptcy in politics. Nor will Robert Mueller agree to an out-of-court settlement if he decides the president (or his family members) have committed crimes.
It is, of course, entirely possible that Veselnitskaya was simply freelancing: Despite her extensive Kremlin ties, she has been a long-time campaigner against the Magnitsky Act, and maybe she was acting on her own, bluffing about the Clinton material. The problem for Trump is that this first suggestion of real collusion comes after a mountain of other circumstantial evidence, including the investigations into Kushner and Manafort; Flynn’s duplicity about his meetings; and Sessions’s failure to disclose meetings. It also comes after Trump tried to pressure then-FBI Director James Comey to drop an investigation into Flynn, and then fired Comey, citing the Russia investigation. That firing led to Mueller’s appointment as special counsel. Finally, the disclosure of the Veselnitskaya meeting comes as Trump refuses to concede Russian interference, and, according to the Russian foreign minister, accepted Russian denials during a meeting at the G20 on Friday.
This welter of circumstantial evidence, along with the possible weaknesses in the case, are why an independent investigation by Mueller is so important to understanding what happened. Instead of welcoming the inquiry as a chance to clear his name, though, Trump has criticized Mueller and mused about removing him. That, too, raises questions.
- David A. Graham,
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