When Donald Trump returns from the G-20 Summit, he may have to deal with yet another brush fire surrounding his campaign’s suspected links with Russia. Late Saturday afternoon, The New York Times reported that his son, Donald Jr., set up a meeting with a prominent Russian lawyer with very close links to the Kremlin just after his father locked up the Republican nomination for president.
The Times learned that on June 9, 2016; Donald Jr., brother-in-law Jared Kushner, and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort met with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a lawyer best known for her role in fighting the blacklisting of suspected Russian human rights abusers. She is also the wife of a former deputy transportation minister for the Moscow region. Many of her clients are state-owned businesses. The meeting only came to light when Kushner revealed it after updating the forms he needed for his security clearance; he’d been under fire for not properly disclosing his contacts with foreigners.
In a statement, Donald Jr. confirmed that the meeting took place. He claimed that the meeting primarily concerned an adoption program that Putin shut down in retaliation for the blacklist. However, in a claim that simply defies belief, Donald Jr. says that he was invited to the meeting by “an acquaintance” who didn’t tell him “the name of the person I would be meeting with beforehand.”
But that account is directly contradicted by the other two men on hand at the meeting. Manafort revealed the meeting to congressional investigators, and also says that Donald, Jr. was the man who organized the meeting. Kushner, through his attorney, says that when he updated his disclosure forms, he revealed that he attended the meeting “at the request of his brother-in-law Donald Trump Jr.”
Even without this to consider, there are a lot of other reasons why this meeting looks curious at best. For one thing, Manafort has been under fire for some time for his ties to Russia. He orchestrated an illegal lobbying campaign for Ukraine’s former pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and took $1.7 million in under-the-table payments from Yanukovych’s party. It has since emerged that Manafort and other campaign aides were in active contact with Russian officials for most of the campaign.
Donald Jr. admits that he had contact with Russians, but maintains that he never discussed government policies with Russians. But CNN commentator and former Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod doesn’t think that passes the smell test.
So @DonaldJTrumpJr pulled in top campaign officials to meet with Russian operative to talk…adoption? https://t.co/fguY6cNONA NYTimes:
— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) July 8, 2017
And one of those top campaign officials has a long history of working on behalf of Russia. If that wasn’t enough, Donald Jr.’s account of the meeting doesn’t square with those of the other two people on hand at the meeting.
In the hours since this story went live on The Times’ Website, we haven’t seen any angry tweets from either Donald Jr. or Donald Sr. That’s rather surprising, given their shared distaste for “the failing New York Times.” Hmmm–does that mean that the Trumps know that the Old Gray Lady has them busted?
(featured image courtesy Max Goldberg, available under a Creative Commons-BY license)
