It is no longer possible to dismiss the Russia scandal as fake news.<\/b>
\nThe June 2016 email thread in which Donald Trump Jr. was offered Russian government help for the Trump campaign has now been released, and it is utterly damning.
In the thread, publicist Rob Goldstone writes clear as day that a prosecutor in Russia met a client of his, and offered to give the Trump campaign incriminating information on Hillary Clinton \u201cas part of Russia and its government\u2019s support for Mr. Trump.\u201d
\u201cIf it\u2019s what you say I love it especially later in the summer, \u201d Trump Jr. responded.
The full thread \u2014 posted by Trump Jr. himself in two tweets in an effort to preempt a story by the New York Times\u2019 Jo Becker, Adam Goldman, and Matt Apuzzo \u2014 makes indisputably clear that Trump Jr. was trying to collude with the Russian government.
In the thread, Goldstone goes on to schedule a meeting between Trump Jr. and a \u201cRussian government attorney\u201d who he said would convey the information. Trump Jr. also forwards on the thread to Jared Kushner and then-Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, confirming the time of the meeting.
To be blunt: This changes everything.
The email thread makes clear that Donald Trump Jr. was aware of and willing to support a Russian government effort to help his father\u2019s campaign.
It suggests that Kushner and Manafort were also in the loop.
And it raises serious questions of how Donald Trump himself could have kept professing to disbelieve claims that Russia was helping him.
What actually happened when Trump Jr., Kushner, and Manafort met Russian government attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya on June 9,2016, in Trump Tower remains unclear.
Trump Jr. has claimed in a statement that he was given no useful information at the meeting and that the matter went no further. Yet previous accounts he\u2019s given of the meeting keep leaving out relevant details that emerge later on.
There remains a great deal we still don\u2019 t know about the Russia scandal. For instance, what, if anything, Trump\u2019s team actually ended up doing with the Russians is still unclear. Did any collaborative effort or private understanding materialize in the end? Was the Trump campaign tipped off about the Russian hacking and planned leaks of prominent Democrats\u2019 emails? What, exactly, did Donald Trump know?
But it\u2019s no longer possible to dismiss the Russia scandal as fake news. The future of Trump\u2019s presidency hinges on what Special Counsel Robert Mueller\u2019s investigation finds.
On June 3,2016, publicist Rob Goldstone sent his acquaintance Donald Trump Jr. a tantalizing email headlined \u201cRussia — Clinton — private and confidential\u201d:
Goldstone said he was writing at the behest of Aras and Emin Agalarov, a father-son pair of real estate developers who do business with Russia and worked with the Trumps on the 2013 Miss Universe pageant. (Emin is also a Russian pop star .)
He said that \u201cthe Crown prosecutor of Russia\u201d met with Aras and \u201coffered 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\u201d to Trump. (\u201cCrown prosecutor\u201d is a British term and that exact position doesn\u2019 t exist in Russia, but the Times suggests Goldstone may have been referring to the Russian prosecutor general.)
And crucially, Goldstone made clear that the information would be \u201cpart of Russia and its government\u2019s support for Mr. Trump \u2014 helped along by Aras and Emin.\u201d
Trump Jr. responded enthusiastically \u2014 \u201cif it\u2019s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.\u201d
Goldstone then helps set up a phone call between Trump Jr. and Emin Agalarov, and later arranges a meeting between Trump Jr. and someone he calls \u201cThe Russian government attorney who is flying over from Moscow.\u201d
Trump Jr. confirms the meeting and says then-campaign manager Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner will also attend:
Later, the meeting was rescheduled, and Trump Jr. forwarded the new time and apparently the entire thread to Kushner and Manafort:
The meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya then took place the following day, on June 9.
Throughout the past year, Trump and his team have denied and disparaged reports that the Russian government tried to help his candidacy, and that there was any collusion between his team and Russia.
Trump himself for months publicly professed not even to believe that the Russian government was behind the hackings and leaks of prominent Democrats\u2019 emails, something that is the consensus judgment of US intelligence agencies.
In the opening months of this year, report after report of strange or suspicious behavior from Trump and his team members around Russia kept emerging. But we still lacked outright proof that there was any private understanding or behind-the-scenes collaboration between the two camps. It remained theoretically possible that what US intelligence agencies said was a multifaceted Russian effort to help Trump win was done without anyone from the Trump team knowing about it.
That is no longer possible. We have indisputable proof that people very close to the president indeed \u2014 his son, his son-in-law\/top adviser, and his then-campaign chair \u2014 were not only aware of but encouraging of a Russian government effort to help Trump win the White House.
Think about it: Goldstone casually sent Trump Jr. an email saying his information would be \u201cpart of Russia and its government\u2019s support for Mr. Trump\u201d \u2014 casually stating Russia\u2019s support for Trump as if it were an unremarkable fact.
Trump Jr.\u2019s response is similarly blas\u00e9. Rather than being confused or questioning what Goldstone means when he\u2019s referring to the Russian government\u2019s support for Trump, the president\u2019s son cheerily responds \u201cIf it\u2019s what you say I love it\u201d and proceeds to try to get the details. And he forwards the thread on to Kushner and Manafort.
It\u2019s hard to read these emails and not conclude that the top echelons of the Trump campaign were well aware of the Russian government\u2019s support for Trump and willing to collaborate in the effort \u2014 which you\u2019 d have to think implies that Trump himself has been well aware of this knowledge all along.
Now, the White House has said that the president only learned about this Trump Jr. meeting in recent days. Still, one has to wonder whether the president\u2019s repeated complaints about the Russia investigation and his firing of FBI director James Comey were in part motivated by trying to stop information like this \u2014 information that could even expose his son to criminal charges, according to experts interviewed by my colleague Zack Beauchamp \u2014 from turning up.
What the Trump camp and Russian government-linked actors actually talked about or did together remains unknown. Perhaps this particular meeting did indeed lead nowhere, as Trump Jr. claims (though his story has already changed so much that it\u2019s difficult to take the new version at face value) .
But even if that\u2019s true, it raises yet more questions about just what else Trump campaign advisers like Manafort and Kushner (who attended this meeting) and Michael Flynn (whose name has surfaced in recent reports about GOP operatives\u2019 efforts to contact Russian hackers) may have said to or done with the Russians.
The bigger picture is that it\u2019s now impossible to dispute that the investigations into the Trump campaign, and Russian collusion is an extremely serious matter. Special Counsel Robert Mueller\u2019s inquiry needs to proceed unimpeded, and congressional investigators need to do their own work as well. The country needs to get to the bottom of what happened here.<\/p>\n

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