National Review Online
Tuesday, July 11, 2017
It’s been a journalistic season of hype, innuendo, and
sometimes flat-out error on the Russia story, but the New York Times finally hit paydirt in the last several days.
Over the weekend, the Times
revealed that Donald Trump Jr., then–campaign manager Paul Manafort, and Jared
Kushner met with a Kremlin-connected lawyer at Trump Tower in Manhattan on June
9, 2016, two weeks after Trump Sr. had effectively clinched the Republican
nomination for president. Trump Jr. responded to say that the meeting was to
discuss adoption (the Kremlin, characteristically, prohibited Americans from
adopting Russian children in response to the Magnitsky Act, a 2012 sanctions
law targeting Russian human-rights abusers). In fact, as the Times reported on Monday, Trump Jr. took
the meeting hoping to obtain compromising information about the Clinton
campaign, as promised by an intermediary in a lengthy e-mail exchange.
On Tuesday, to preempt another Times scoop, Trump Jr. released the correspondence himself. In an
e-mail dated June 3, 2016, Rob Goldstone, a former tabloid reporter and
Trump-family friend, suggested that a high-level Russian prosecutor and Russian
real-estate magnate Aras Agalarov — with whom Donald Trump Sr. became
acquainted in 2013, when the pair collaborated on the Miss Universe pageant in
Moscow — had “offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official
documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with
Russia and would be very useful to your father.” According to Goldstone, the
offer was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Donald
Trump Jr. responded: “If it’s what you say[,] I love it.” According to the
e-mails, Trump Jr. perhaps spoke on the phone with Agalarov’s son, Emin (a
Russian pop star), and then the campaign higher-ups met at Trump Tower with
Natalia Veselnitskaya, identified by Goldstone in the exchange as “a Russian
government attorney.” (Veselnitskaya, who is Kremlin-connected, has campaigned
in Europe and the United States against sanctions; she disputes the
well-documented account of whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky’s brutal death at the
hands of Russian officials.) The whole correspondence appears to have been
forwarded to Manafort and Kushner prior to the meeting.
No campaign professional would have accepted such a dodgy
meeting the way Trump Jr. did, and no person with a strong sense of propriety —
Russia is a hostile power run by a deeply corrupt regime — would have wanted
to.
That said, the meeting doesn’t prove that the Trump
campaign colluded with Russia, let alone “treason.” In the best-case scenario,
Trump Jr. took the meeting to accommodate a friend of the family (and Kushner
and Manafort showed up to accommodate the son of the candidate); Goldstone’s
suggestion that he had compromising information about the Clintons was only a
pretense to get Velnitskaya through the door; everyone was as bored during the
meeting as Velnitskaya has said (in a Today
interview, she said Kushner left early and Manafort looked at his phone the
entire time); and nothing else came of it.
In general, it’s hard to see why the Kremlin would have
wanted to jeopardize a sensitive intelligence operation by attempting to
coordinate with a poorly organized presidential campaign.
The worst case, on the other hand, is that the Trump Jr.
meeting is only the beginning of damaging revelations about some sort of
relationship between a Russian government determined to try to tip the scales
in an American presidential election and the Trump campaign.
It would be easier to credit the Trump team’s denials if
they didn’t so routinely mislead. Put aside Trump Jr.’s self-servingly
incomplete account of the meeting with the Russian lawyer; he has said in the
past that he never at any point met with Russian nationals, that he never
discussed policy matters with Russian citizens, and that he never met with any
Russians as a representative of the campaign. All of those statements have
proven false. Paul Manafort’s record of truth-telling is no better, and Jared
Kushner — the only person in the meeting with a White House job — initially
failed to disclose the meeting during his security-clearance application
process.
If the Trump team affirmatively wanted to stoke
suspicions of the worst, it wouldn’t be acting any differently. One meeting
doesn’t prove collusion, but it does demonstrate the seriousness of this matter
and the public interest in getting to the bottom of it — now more than ever.
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