- As reported by several articles in the New York Times Donald Trump Jr. was told in an email of Russian effort to aid the campaign and met with a Russian lawyer linked to the Kremlin during the campaign to get dirt on Clinton. The New York Times now has the email to Donald Trump Jr. offering Russian aid to “incriminate Hillary.” His reply: “If it’s what you say I love it.” Read the new article.
Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email. The email to the younger Mr. Trump was sent by Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid reporter who helped broker the June 2016 meeting. In a statement on July 9th, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he was interested in receiving damaging information about Mrs. Clinton, but gave no indication that he thought the lawyer might have been a Kremlin proxy. Mr. Goldstone’s message, as described to The New York Times by the three people, indicates that the Russian government was the source of the potentially damaging information. It does not elaborate on the wider effort by Moscow to help the Trump campaign.
The Times first reported on the existence of the meeting on July 8th, and a fuller picture has emerged in subsequent days. Alan Futerfas, the lawyer for the younger Mr. Trump, said his client had done nothing wrong but pledged to work with investigators if contacted. “In my view, this is much ado about nothing. During this busy period, Robert Goldstone contacted Don Jr. in an email and suggested that people had information concerning alleged wrongdoing by Democratic Party front-runner, Hillary Clinton, in her dealings with Russia,” he told The Times in an email on Monday. “Don Jr.’s takeaway from this communication was that someone had information potentially helpful to the campaign and it was coming from someone he knew. Don Jr. had no knowledge as to what specific information, if any, would be discussed.”
On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow shares breaking news from the New York Times that Donald Trump, Jr. was told in an e-mail that the Russian government was behind the anti-Hillary Clinton information he would receive at a meeting with a Russian lawyer.
On The Rachel Maddow Show Congressman Adam Schiff, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, talks with Rachel Maddow about which aspects of the Trump Russia collusion investigation have the potential for criminality beyond mere scandal.
On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell The New York Times reports Donald Trump Jr. was told via email the Russian government wanted to aid the Trump campaign. Former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks says it looks like collusion. Ron Klain and Bill Browder, who knows the Russian lawyer involved, join.
On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Lawrence O’Donnell talks to Ana Marie Cox and Ron Klain about President Trump’s reaction about the news about Donald Trump, Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin.
On The Rachel Maddow Show Mark Mazzetti, Washington investigations editor for the New York Times, talks with Rachel Maddow about the story of Donald Trump, Jr. meeting with Russians and what questions remain to be investigated.
On The Rachel Maddow Show Barbara McQuade, former U.S. attorney, talks with Rachel Maddow about what laws Donald Trump, Jr. may have broken in colluding with Russia, and what further legal jeopardy his father may be in as a result of this meeting’s revelation.
On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Lawrence O’Donnell explains that while the revelations of Donald Trump Jr.’s emails pertaining to his meeting with a Russian lawyer during the campaign are damaging for Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort, the implications for Jared Kushner could be much, much worse.
On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell The Trump administration is under another round of fire for Don Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer, after he released damaging emails concerning him, Kushner, and Manafort. Lawrence O’Donnell discusses with Bob Bauer, David Cay Johnston, and Max Boot.
On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Donald Trump Jr. is distancing himself from the Russians who set up his meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer, despite their history of business dealings with Donald Trump. David Corn and Josh Barro join Lawrence O’Donnell to discuss Donald Jr.’s defense.
Trump’s legal team was informed more than three weeks ago about the email chain arranging a June 2016 meeting between his son Donald Jr. and a Kremlin-connected lawyer, two sources familiar with the handling of the matter told Yahoo News. Trump told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday July 12th 2017 that he learned just “a couple of days ago” that Donald Jr. had met with the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, hoping to receive information that “would incriminate Hillary” and was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” A day earlier, on Tuesday July 11th, Donald Jr. released the email exchanges himself, after learning they would be published by the New York Times. Trump repeated that assertion in a talk with reporters on Air Force One on his way to Paris Wednesday (July 12th 2017) night. “I only heard about it two or three days ago,” he said, according to a transcript of his talk, when asked about the meeting with Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in June 2016 attended by Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign chief, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. But the sources told Yahoo News that Marc Kasowitz, the president’s chief lawyer in the Russia investigation, and Alan Garten, executive vice president and chief legal officer of the Trump Organization, were both informed about the emails in the third week of June, after they were discovered by lawyers for Kushner, who is now a senior White House official.
On All In with Chris Hayes Everyone has been laughing about Kellyanne Conway’s show and tell on Fox News. But did you catch exactly what she said there?
On All In with Chris Hayes Joy Reid and Lawrence Wright join Chris Hayes to discuss how the Republican Party has lowered the bar in the era of Trump.
On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow explores the latest reporting in the investigation into Trump campaign collusion with Russia as the investigation expands and Trump supporters struggle to recast the Trump Jr. collusion scandal.
On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow looks at revelations in a new report from the Wall Street Journal that Russian officials were heard discussing Donald Trump in the spring of 2015. A year later European intel warned of Russian money flowing into the US election.
On The Rachel Maddow Show Shane Harris, senior national security writer for the Wall Street Journal, talks with Rachel Maddow about his reporting on new perspectives on some of the earliest indications of interactions between Russia and Donald Trump associates.
The Republican donor and operative from Chicago’s North Shore who said he had tried to obtain Hillary Clinton’s missing emails from Russian hackers killed himself in a Minnesota hotel room days after talking to The Wall Street Journal about his efforts, public records show. In mid-May, in a room at a Rochester hotel used almost exclusively by Mayo Clinic patients and relatives, Peter W. Smith, 81, left a carefully prepared file of documents, including a statement police called a suicide note in which he said he was in ill health and a life insurance policy was expiring. Days earlier, the financier from suburban Lake Forest gave an interview to the Journal about his quest, and it began publishing stories about his efforts in late June. The Journal also reported it had seen emails written by Smith showing his team considered retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, then a top adviser to Republican Donald Trump’s campaign, an ally. Flynn briefly was Trump’s national security adviser and resigned after it was determined he had failed to disclose contacts with Russia.
On All In with Chris Hayes A sad twist in the story of a GOP operative who sought Hillary Clinton e-mails he believed were in the possession of Russian hackers — and who intimated he was working with Michael Flynn.
On The Rachel Maddow Show Greg Gordon, investigative reporter for McClatchy DC, talks with Rachel Maddow about how investigators are looking into whether Russians had assistance from Americans in strategizing where to direct their online propaganda.
On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell New details suggest Trump may have known weeks ago about the meeting his son, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort had with a Kremlin-linked lawyer, contradicting his statements he only just found out about it. Nancy Soderberg and Jeremy Bash join Lawrence O’Donnell.
As reported in The Atlantic the Russian attorney at the center of the Trump Jr. scandal, who is Natalia Veselnitskaya, and what does she want? Natalia Veselnitskaya, 42, once served as a prosecutor in the Moscow region, an area that encompasses the vast Moscow suburbs, military towns, and dacha communities. The region is both rich and rife with corruption and organized crime. It is this relatively rough and provincial background that makes Russian observers skeptical about Veselnitskaya’s sudden entrée into the distant scandals of Washington. “Instead of the highest [Russian] officials, spies, and the famous diplomat [Sergei] Kislyak, we now get a Moscow region mover and shaker with a reputation for as a ‘fixer,’ who fits into the scandals at the local, regional level, but seems absurd as part of the world of geopolitics,” writes the Russian journalist Oleg Kashin.
Few people in Moscow had heard of Veselnitskaya until she burst onto the pages of The New York Times. Those who had, though, spoke of her fearsome reputation. “She was probably the most aggressive person I’ve ever encountered in all my conflicts with Russians,” says Bill Browder, a former investor in Russia who has been fighting Veselnitskaya in court for four years. “She is vindictive and ruthless and unrelenting.” According to Browder, Veselnitskaya hired a team and spent millions of dollars to track his movements around the world in order to serve him with a subpoena that would force him to turn over 20 years worth of documents. Veselnitskaya did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The Moscow region was a good place for a young lawyer to sharpen her teeth, as well as to find the clients and political patrons that would help her rise. She became close to both the powerful governor of the region, Boris Gromov, as well as to the family of Yury Chaika, then the Russian justice minister and now the prosecutor general of the Russian Federation. (He seems to be the person mistakenly referred to as “the Crown prosecutor of Russia” in the emails Trump Jr. released this week.) According to people who know her, she remains close to the Chaika family; she told The Wall Street Journal on Friday that she knew Chaika personally. It was also during this time that Veselnitskaya became close to the family that would bring her to New York and, ultimately, to Trump Tower.
On All In with Chris Hayes How did a self-proclaimed adoption lawyer-lobbyist end up at the center of one of the biggest scandals in American political history?
The Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. and others on the Trump team after a promise of compromising material on Hillary Clinton was accompanied by a Russian-American lobbyist — a former Soviet counterintelligence officer who is suspected by some U.S. officials of having ongoing ties to Russian intelligence, NBC News has learned. The lobbyist, first identified by the Associated Press as Rinat Akhmetshin, denies any current ties to Russian spy agencies. He accompanied the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, to the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower attended by Donald Trump Jr.; Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law; and Paul Manafort, former chairman of the Trump campaign.
He had been working with Veselnitskaya on a campaign against the Magnitsky Act, a set of sanctions against alleged Russian human rights violators. That issue, which is also related to a ban on American adoptions of Russian children, is what Veselnitskaya told NBC News she discussed with the Trump team. But, given the email traffic suggesting the meeting was part of a Russian effort to help Trump’s candidacy, the presence at the meeting of a Russian-American with suspected intelligence ties is likely to be of interest to special counsel Robert Mueller and the House and Senate panels investigating the Russian election interference campaign.
As has been previously reported, the meeting was set up by music publicist Rob Goldstone, who told Donald Trump Jr. in an email chain that Veselnitskaya has “information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.” Goldstone called Veselnitskaya a “Russian government attorney” — though she disputes that — and said the information was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” The Associated Press quoted Akhmetshin saying that Veselnitskaya brought with her to the meeting a plastic folder with printed-out documents that detailed what she believed was a flow of illicit funds to the Democratic National Committee. The lobbyist said Veselnitskaya presented the contents of the documents to the Trump team, suggesting it could help the Trump campaign, he said.
On All In with Chris Hayes A closer look at the oligarch and his pop singer son who offered to provide the Trump campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton – straight from the Russian government.
On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow reports on new revelations about the number of people in attendance at Donald Trump Jr.’s campaign meeting with Russians, and a bevy of new details about who those people are and what they did.
On The Rachel Maddow Show Michael Carpenter, former deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, talks with Rachel Maddow about Russia’s practice of finding local groups in the countries they target for cyber attacks and other intrusions.
On The Rachel Maddow Show Michael Carpenter, former deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, talks with Rachel Maddow about the sheer number of Kremlin-connected Russians who met with members of the Trump campaign.
On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Even with the news a former Soviet counter-intelligence officer was in Trump Jr’s June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer, there are still unanswered questions.
On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Discussing Donald Trump Jr’s meeting with a Russian lawyer, Boston Globe Washington columnist Indira Lakshmanan says ‘more shoes than in Imelda Marcos’ entire closet’ are still waiting to drop.
On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams A CIA veteran writes in The Washington Post that Trump Jr’s June 2016 meeting with multiple Russians looks like a ‘intelligence soft pitch’ by the Kremlin. Rick Stengel & Ken Dilanian discuss.
On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Discussing proof of collusion in Donald Trump Jr’s emails, some fierce Trump defenders on Capitol Hill are asking what’s the big deal? Shannon Pettypiece, Jason Johnson, & Jim Sharpe react.
Ike Kaveladze attended the meeting as a representative of Aras and Emin Agalarov, the father-and-son Russian developers who hosted the Trump-owned Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013, according to Scott Balber, an attorney for the Agalarovs who said he also represents Kaveladze. Balber said Tuesday that he had received a phone call over the weekend from a representative of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III asking if Kaveladze would agree to be interviewed. Balber said his client would cooperate. The request is the first public indication that Mueller’s team is investigating the meeting.
The presence of Kaveladze at the Trump Tower meeting introduces a new and intriguing figure into the increasingly complex Trump-Russia drama. A native of the Soviet republic of Georgia who came to the United States in 1991, Kaveladze was the subject nearly two decades ago of a congressional inquiry into Russian money laundering in US banks, although he was never charged with a crime and Balber said there was never any sign of wrongdoing by Kaveladze. The emergence of new information on Tuesday (July 18th 2017) — some 10 days after the Trump Tower meeting was first reported — underscored how details of the session have been slow to emerge amid incomplete and potentially misleading explanations from Trump Jr.
On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Who is Ike Kaveladze, the eighth person – and fourth Russian – we now know was in that June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Donald Trump Jr? Ken Vogel of The New York Times discusses.
Flying home from Germany on July 8 aboard Air Force One, Trump personally dictated a statement in which Trump Jr. said he and the Russian lawyer had “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children” when they met in June 2016, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deliberations. The statement, issued to the New York Times as it prepared a story, emphasized that the subject of the meeting was “not a campaign issue at the time.” The claims were later shown to be misleading.
Over the next three days, multiple accounts of the meeting were provided to the media as public pressure mounted, with Trump Jr. ultimately acknowledging that he had accepted the meeting after receiving an email promising damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help his father’s campaign. The extent of the president’s personal intervention in his son’s response, the details of which have not previously been reported, adds to a series of actions that Trump has taken that some advisers fear could place him and some members of his inner circle in legal jeopardy.
As Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III investigates potential obstruction of justice as part of his broader probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election, these advisers worry that the president’s direct involvement leaves him needlessly vulnerable to allegations of a coverup. “This was . . . unnecessary,” said one of the president’s advisers, who like most other people interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations. “Now someone can claim he’s the one who attempted to mislead. Somebody can argue the president is saying he doesn’t want you to say the whole truth.” Trump has already come under criticism for steps he has taken to challenge and undercut the Russia probe.
On All In with Chris Hayes Philip Rucker of the Washington Post joins Chris Hayes with breaking news on the statement issued by Donald Trump Jr on his meeting with Russian lawyer.
On The 11th Hour with Brian Williams Michael Crowley, Vivian Salama and Richard Painter offer analysis on the Washington Post’s breaking story about the president’s personal intervention in his son’s response.
On All In with Chris Hayes The White House has a pretty remarkable explanation for Trump’s role in his son’s grossly misleading statement about his Russia meeting.
On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell Former federal prosecutor Paul Butler says if reports that Trump weighed in on his son’s misleading statement about a meeting with Russians is true, there’s evidence Trump participated in a cover-up. Peter Baker and Eli Stokols also join Lawrence O’Donnell.
