We haven’t seen much of Reince Priebus since Sunday. If you’ll recall, hours after we learned that Donald Trump Jr. met with a Kremlin-connected lawyer in the summer of 2016, Priebus dismissed the whole thing as a false flag ginned up by the same people who helped Christopher Steele compile a dossier that suggested Russia had compromising information on Trump. For good measure, Priebus dismissed the dossier as fake news.
Just hours later, however, The New York Times revealed, and Donald Jr. admitted, that he went to that meeting expecting to hear dirt on Hillary Clinton–from Russia, with love. Then, on Monday afternoon, Donald Jr. was all but forced to release an email exchange that revealed he jumped at an offer for information about Hillary direct from the Kremlin. And it turns out that those emails closely track with portions of that supposedly bogus dossier.
David Corn of Mother Jones first reported on the Steele dossier a week before the election–well before Buzzfeed and CNN reported on it. He noticed that Donald Jr.’s emails seem to support a claim Steele made in June 20–that the Trump camp received “a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin” about his political rivals, including Hillary.
That entry was dated two weeks after Rob Goldstone told Donald Jr. that the father of one of his clients had met with a senior Russian prosecutor who was willing to give Trump salacious information about Hillary. As we now know, six days after that email, Donald Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower.
According to Steele’s June 20 report, at least two of Steele’s sources reported that Moscow had been funneling the Trump camp “valuable intelligence” about Hillary and his other adversaries for years. One of those sources, a close Trump confidant who helped organize Trump’s trips to Moscow, said this Russian opposition research (read: espionage) was “very helpful.”
To Corn’s mind, Donald Jr.’s email exchange proves one of the “overarching points” in this memo–that the Trump campaign was regularly receiving dirt about Hillary from Russia. And now, based on these emails, it looks like Donald Jr. actively sought to receive negative information about Hillary from “a foreign adversary.”
On the face of it, we now have confirmation of yet another portion of Steele’s dossier. American intelligence has yet to confirm the more salacious portions of that dossier–including reports that Trump was caught on tape engaging in “golden showers.” However, investigators have been able to confirm that conversations Steele referenced took place on the dates that Steele said they took place. They have also confirmed that a former Russian diplomat was really a spy who was deeply involved in the Russian effort to hack the election. Moreover, the FBI used the dossier as the basis for a FISA warrant on Trump confidant Carter Page.
It’s possible that we may get formal confirmation of Steele’s findings very soon. CNN’s Evan Perez reports that special counsel Robert Mueller is looking into the emails.
When Corn added this email dump to a working timeline of the entire Trump-Russia scandal, it didn’t take him long to see the implications.
A Putin official conspired w/ Trump's Russian business partner to secretly help Trump. These are not dots. These are icebergs. https://t.co/xK9uu5kz5p
— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) July 11, 2017
In a normal world, that iceberg would be enough at the very least to sink Donald Jr.’s career at his dad’s company. At worst, it’s treasonous. When the best-case scenario is that this is a firing offense, that’s not a good sign.
For the better part of two years, Trump and his cronies tried to kneecap Hillary over her email server, even though there was never any evidence of willful misconduct. Now we know that Donald Jr. willfully sought to crawl into a bed with an agent of a hostile power in order to help his dad win. Karma is a lovely thing, isn’t it?
(featured image courtesy Max Goldberg, available under a Creative Commons-BY license)
