Politics Donald Trump Jr just confessed to Trump campaign election fraud

Donald Trump Jr. has made a potentially damaging New York Times report much, much worse.

The Times on Sunday reported that the president's eldest son was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in New York on June 9, 2016.

As Times reporters Jo Becker, Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman explained, Trump Jr.’s motivation for agreeing to the meeting “points to the central question in federal investigations of the Kremlin’s meddling in the presidential election: whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians. The accounts of the meeting represent the first public indication that at least some in the campaign were willing to accept Russian help.”

Paul Manafort, the campaign’s chairman at the time, and Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, also attended.

Needless to say, the report looks bad for the president, even though his private legal team told the Times that Trump did not participate or even know about the meeting. Trump has a go-to playbook in situations like these: cast doubt on the credibility of unnamed sources (five, in this case) and cry, “Fake news!”

But Trump Jr. took that strategy off the table with a stunningly compromising first response. Check out this excerpt from the Times report:

In a statement on Sunday, Donald Trump Jr. said he had met with the Russian lawyer at the request of an acquaintance. “After pleasantries were exchanged,” he said, “the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”

He said she then turned the conversation to adoption of Russian children and the Magnitsky Act, an American law that blacklists suspected Russian human rights abusers. The law so enraged President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that he retaliated by halting American adoptions of Russian children.

“It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting,” Mr. Trump said.
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Read that last part again: “the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting.”

Trump Jr. confirmed that he went into the meeting expecting to receive information from the Russian lawyer that could hurt Clinton. That is a breathtaking admission.

The rest of Trump Jr.’s statement is an attempt to minimize the value of what the lawyer actually told him. The outcome of the meeting and its effect on the presidential race is important, of course, yet it is kind of beside the point.

Trump Jr.’s attempt to obtain information from a Russian lawyer that could harm Clinton seems likely to alarm investigators, regardless of whether the effort proved successful.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...to-the-new-york-times/?utm_term=.8df89fe6c515

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Probably best to have Ivanka be the only Trump child allowed to talk to the press.

 

Eric is widely seen as "the dumb one" but we may have to reconsider that.

barfo

 

And tonight it is reported that Trump Jr. was notified by email that the subject matter of the meeting would be efforts by Russia to help the Trump campaign.

So, for those of you who have been saying "where's the evidence of collusion"... there it is.

barfo

 

Don jr also gets emails from Nigerian princes but that doesn't mean they tried to fuck with our election.

- Denny Crane

 

Knowing and seeing the actual email, Trump may say all this is this fake news.

 

So the DNC/Clinton campaign hires British spies with Russian sources to compile a disproven dossier on Trump and that's OK.

Got it.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article160622854.html

The dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele and his London firm, Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd., amounted to a collection of uncorroborated reports of collusion gathered as political research for sale to Trump’s opponents. It proved explosive when published by online news site BuzzFeed on Jan. 10.

Now, two lawsuits — one in the United States and a second in the U.K. — are being brought by lawyers for Aleksej Gubarev, a Cyprus-based Internet entrepreneur whom Steele’s Russian sources accused of cyber spying against the Democratic Party leadership.

According to a new court document in the British lawsuit, counsel for defendants Steele and Orbis repeatedly point to McCain, R-Ariz., a vocal Trump critic, and a former State Department official as two in a handful of people known to have had copies of the full document before it circulated among journalists and was published by BuzzFeed.

The court document obtained by McClatchy confirms that Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Moscow and a Russia adviser to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, discussed the 35-page dossier with McCain.

 

Joe Scarbourough's show this morning was ranting on and on about the scoop NBC has with an interview with the woman who met with Trump.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russian-lawyer-who-met-trump-jr-i-didn-t-have-n781631

Russian Lawyer Who Met With Trump Jr.: I Didn’t Have Clinton Info They Wanted

But Veselnitskaya flatly denied any connection to the Russian government. Kremlin officials said on Monday that they were unaware of who the lawyer is.

Veselnitskaya explained how she had worked for years to question the case that prompted the U.S. to impose sanctions on Russian officials accused of human rights violations, known as the Magnitsky Act. These sanctions led the Kremlin to ban the adoption of Russian children by Americans at the end of 2012.

Part of the information she put together for her client included details about a company run by a former U.S. citizen. She believes this company didn’t pay taxes in either Russia or the U.S. and may also have made donations to the DNC.

These details are what may have tweaked the interest of Trump’s campaign, she said.

 

From January.

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/ukraine-sabotage-trump-backfire-233446

Donald Trump wasn’t the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by officials of a former Soviet bloc country.

Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.

A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia. But they were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia’s alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails.

 

Russia, Russia, Russia

Should be

Russia, Ukraine, Britain, Russia, Ukraine, Britain