They both can't be Fredo, can they? Junior and Eric

[GreyhoundFan]

Excellent analysis. I don't think I've seen this one posted. Apologies if it's a duplicate: "Donald Trump Jr.’s emails are far more damning than anyone could have imagined"

Spoiler

Randall D. Eliason teaches white-collar criminal law at George Washington University Law School. He blogs at Sidebarsblog.com.

Donald Trump Jr. has just released the emails that led to his meeting in June 2016 with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. Jaw-dropping is not too strong a term for them.

As I wrote Monday, this meeting — also attended by President Trump’s then-campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner — is potentially a key piece of evidence in the investigation of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian nationals.

Trump Jr. had already admitted he attended the meeting after being informed by email that Veselnitskaya was offering to provide damaging information about Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. But the emails themselves — which he posted on Twitter apparently after learning that the New York Times was about to publish them — are far more damning than anyone could have imagined.

The email from Trump associate Rob Goldstone bears the subject line, “Russia-Clinton — private and confidential.” It says that the “Crown prosecutor of Russia” was offering to provide the Trump campaign “some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.” He explains this is “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” The emails describe Veselnitskaya as a “Russian government attorney.”

Trump Jr.’s response to this offer: “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer” — in other words, closer to the date of the election. He proceeded to set up the meeting, and told Goldstone that Kushner and Manafort would also attend.

Wow — where to begin? First, the emails establish that the entire purpose of the meeting was to share potentially compromising information about Clinton. Trump Jr. and others have claimed the meeting was primarily about sanctions against Russia and the prohibition of U.S. adoptions of Russian children. Those topics are mentioned nowhere in the emails.

The emails also make it perfectly clear that the source of the proffered information is the Russian government. The Trump team may have tried to characterize Veselnitskaya as a private Russian lawyer and to claim that they had no reason to think she was acting on behalf of the government of Russian President Vladi­mir Putin. But the emails could not be plainer that the proffered information is from the Russian government and “is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Finally, the email resolves any doubt about Trump Jr.’s state of mind concerning possible assistance from Putin. His “I love it” pretty much says it all.

Any responsible campaign lawyer or campaign manager, when faced with this type of offer of assistance from the Russian government, would run screaming in the other direction. Hopefully he or she also would report it to the FBI. Team Trump apparently embraced it. In the thick of the campaign, three of Trump’s most senior and trusted advisers took the time to meet with a “Russian government attorney” to see what the Russian government had to offer.

On Monday I referred to prosecutors building a wall of evidence, brick by brick, to establish proof beyond a reasonable doubt of a possible conspiracy. With these emails, Donald Trump Jr. just delivered a wheelbarrow full of bricks to the special counsel’s office.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

A good op-ed from the NYT: "Mini-Donald’s Major Fail"

Spoiler

Sometimes the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Sometimes the apple is also considerably dimmer than the tree. And sometimes the apple must be thrown under the bus so that the tree and a few of its most crucial limbs don’t tumble to the forest floor, where they’ll be chopped up and used as firewood by Democrats.

Is that the fruity fate of Donald Trump Jr.?

On Tuesday morning, he released a chain of emails from June of last year that prove that he was eager to get dirt on Hillary Clinton from a representative of Russia, that the information was indeed characterized as “part of Russia and its government’s support” for his father’s presidential bid and that he held a meeting in the hopes of learning more.

It was, for my money, the most jaw-dropping development yet in an already-surreal presidency, and making sense of it requires some conjecture.

But evaluating the damage doesn’t. This erodes whatever credibility President Trump and those in his inner circle had left (which wasn’t much). Adamantly and incessantly, they have characterized questions about the Trump campaign’s possible cooperation with Russia as ludicrous — a “witch hunt,” in their preferred parlance.

And yet here is a document showing that the notion of such a concerted effort was dangled before the eyes of Trump’s eldest son, who responded with glee — “I love it,” he wrote — and hauled his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort, who was then the campaign’s chairman, into a meeting about it.

With the walls now closing in around Donald Jr., I wouldn’t be surprised if he says that he didn’t really believe the written claim that this was “very high level and sensitive information” from the Russian government itself.

But evaluate any and all spin from him through the lens of his evasions and empty grandstanding to date. When The New York Times first disclosed the meeting in an article on Saturday, he released a statement implying that the meeting’s purpose was to discuss Russian adoptions.

A day later, he significantly changed his story, admitting in a new statement that he had been led to expect material “helpful to the campaign” and that he cut the meeting off when the Russian lawyer who came to Trump Tower diverted the discussion toward adoptions. Read the statement: Bizarrely and hilariously, it’s so focused on the lawyer’s bait-and-switch and Donald Jr.’s disappointment that it boldly confirms how badly he’d craved dirt and how misleading his initial response to The Times was. Like I said: dim.

The emails released on Tuesday make clear how incomplete both of those versions were, and they appear to contradict his insistence in the second statement that Kushner and Manafort knew nothing about the meeting’s intent.

The release of the emails, at least, is no head scratcher: Donald Jr. apparently believed that The Times was about to publish them anyway and figured that if he beat us to the punch, he’d make it look as if he had nothing to hide. He tweeted that he wanted “to be totally transparent.”

Right. “Transparent” has as much to do with his last four days as “modest” does with his father’s entire 71 years.

And flash back to July 24 of last summer, which was just a month and a half after the meeting with the Russian lawyer, and Donald Jr.’s response when the CNN anchor Jake Tapper asked him about the Clinton campaign’s assertion that Russians could be engaged in “a plot to help Donald Trump.”

“It just goes to show you their exact moral compass,” Donald Jr. said, in what will go down as one of the most priceless instances ever of the psychological phenomenon of projection.

He railed to Tapper about “lie after lie” from the Clinton camp, said they’d “do anything to win,” and — my favorite part — claimed that if a Republican were making the kinds of wild allegations of Russian meddling that they were, there’d be a call “to bring out the electric chair” for that person. The electric chair, no less!

Well, he’s on the hot seat now, and the days — by which I mean 48 hours ago — when we were all worked up about Ivanka Trump’s presumptuous place at the G-20 table suddenly seem quaint. That actually is a nothingburger in the context of this whopper.

Of course Papa poo-poo’ed it, releasing a statement Tuesday afternoon that vouched, “My son is a high-quality person.” I can buy that Donald Jr. is too low-wattage a political operative to have understood that his Russia hugging was extraordinary and possibly treasonous, but not that he considered it virtuous.

I wonder whether Ivanka actually factors into this. Among the Trump children, she always sopped up the most lavish praise from Dad and drew the most media fascination. She was cast as his secret weapon. Such a designation eluded Donald Jr. When he met with the Russian lawyer, was he clumsily trying to maneuver his way to greater utility, favor and relevance?

Instead, in the grand tradition of ne’er-do-well namesakes, he brought his sire grief.

There’s no proof that Donald Trump Sr. knew of the meeting with the Russian lawyer, though there’s this: In the week between its scheduling and its occurrence back in June 2016, he made public remarks in which he said he’d be delivering a special speech about Clinton’s wrongdoing that was set — oh so interestingly, in retrospect — for a few days after the meeting. But that meeting, we’re now told, was a bust, with no great trove of Clinton-wounding revelations, and the speech didn’t happen as promised.

It will be interesting to watch the president’s next moves. Enamored of loyalty and deaf to charges of nepotism and conflict of interest, he has kept his kids in a tight circle around him. But to survive, he may have to push this bad apple away.

I can only imagine the screaming that is going on behind the scenes.

[mamallama]

Wow, I thought calling him Fredo was a Freejinger creation.  Hard to believe anyone in the White House these days is that clever.

 

[GrumpyGran]

17 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

A good op-ed from the NYT: "Mini-Donald’s Major Fail"

  Hide contents

Sometimes the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Sometimes the apple is also considerably dimmer than the tree. And sometimes the apple must be thrown under the bus so that the tree and a few of its most crucial limbs don’t tumble to the forest floor, where they’ll be chopped up and used as firewood by Democrats.

Is that the fruity fate of Donald Trump Jr.?

On Tuesday morning, he released a chain of emails from June of last year that prove that he was eager to get dirt on Hillary Clinton from a representative of Russia, that the information was indeed characterized as “part of Russia and its government’s support” for his father’s presidential bid and that he held a meeting in the hopes of learning more.

It was, for my money, the most jaw-dropping development yet in an already-surreal presidency, and making sense of it requires some conjecture.

But evaluating the damage doesn’t. This erodes whatever credibility President Trump and those in his inner circle had left (which wasn’t much). Adamantly and incessantly, they have characterized questions about the Trump campaign’s possible cooperation with Russia as ludicrous — a “witch hunt,” in their preferred parlance.

And yet here is a document showing that the notion of such a concerted effort was dangled before the eyes of Trump’s eldest son, who responded with glee — “I love it,” he wrote — and hauled his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort, who was then the campaign’s chairman, into a meeting about it.

With the walls now closing in around Donald Jr., I wouldn’t be surprised if he says that he didn’t really believe the written claim that this was “very high level and sensitive information” from the Russian government itself.

But evaluate any and all spin from him through the lens of his evasions and empty grandstanding to date. When The New York Times first disclosed the meeting in an article on Saturday, he released a statement implying that the meeting’s purpose was to discuss Russian adoptions.

A day later, he significantly changed his story, admitting in a new statement that he had been led to expect material “helpful to the campaign” and that he cut the meeting off when the Russian lawyer who came to Trump Tower diverted the discussion toward adoptions. Read the statement: Bizarrely and hilariously, it’s so focused on the lawyer’s bait-and-switch and Donald Jr.’s disappointment that it boldly confirms how badly he’d craved dirt and how misleading his initial response to The Times was. Like I said: dim.

The emails released on Tuesday make clear how incomplete both of those versions were, and they appear to contradict his insistence in the second statement that Kushner and Manafort knew nothing about the meeting’s intent.

The release of the emails, at least, is no head scratcher: Donald Jr. apparently believed that The Times was about to publish them anyway and figured that if he beat us to the punch, he’d make it look as if he had nothing to hide. He tweeted that he wanted “to be totally transparent.”

Right. “Transparent” has as much to do with his last four days as “modest” does with his father’s entire 71 years.

And flash back to July 24 of last summer, which was just a month and a half after the meeting with the Russian lawyer, and Donald Jr.’s response when the CNN anchor Jake Tapper asked him about the Clinton campaign’s assertion that Russians could be engaged in “a plot to help Donald Trump.”

“It just goes to show you their exact moral compass,” Donald Jr. said, in what will go down as one of the most priceless instances ever of the psychological phenomenon of projection.

He railed to Tapper about “lie after lie” from the Clinton camp, said they’d “do anything to win,” and — my favorite part — claimed that if a Republican were making the kinds of wild allegations of Russian meddling that they were, there’d be a call “to bring out the electric chair” for that person. The electric chair, no less!

Well, he’s on the hot seat now, and the days — by which I mean 48 hours ago — when we were all worked up about Ivanka Trump’s presumptuous place at the G-20 table suddenly seem quaint. That actually is a nothingburger in the context of this whopper.

Of course Papa poo-poo’ed it, releasing a statement Tuesday afternoon that vouched, “My son is a high-quality person.” I can buy that Donald Jr. is too low-wattage a political operative to have understood that his Russia hugging was extraordinary and possibly treasonous, but not that he considered it virtuous.

I wonder whether Ivanka actually factors into this. Among the Trump children, she always sopped up the most lavish praise from Dad and drew the most media fascination. She was cast as his secret weapon. Such a designation eluded Donald Jr. When he met with the Russian lawyer, was he clumsily trying to maneuver his way to greater utility, favor and relevance?

Instead, in the grand tradition of ne’er-do-well namesakes, he brought his sire grief.

There’s no proof that Donald Trump Sr. knew of the meeting with the Russian lawyer, though there’s this: In the week between its scheduling and its occurrence back in June 2016, he made public remarks in which he said he’d be delivering a special speech about Clinton’s wrongdoing that was set — oh so interestingly, in retrospect — for a few days after the meeting. But that meeting, we’re now told, was a bust, with no great trove of Clinton-wounding revelations, and the speech didn’t happen as promised.

It will be interesting to watch the president’s next moves. Enamored of loyalty and deaf to charges of nepotism and conflict of interest, he has kept his kids in a tight circle around him. But to survive, he may have to push this bad apple away.

I can only imagine the screaming that is going on behind the scenes.

The part of all of this that I find most appalling is that Hillary was under FBI investigation at this time. This was before Comey released his decision. So they have someone tell them there is evidence of collusion between Russia and someone under investigation and they don't notify the agency investigating her? It looks like Trump thought he would use the info for some grandstanding, revealing it himself. I doubt Comey would have found it funny.

Also funny that this woman bait-and-switch'ed them.

[GreyhoundFan]

I don't watch Hannity, because I value my sanity. Ooh, that rhymes. Well, this is an excellent analysis of how far up the Drumpf family collective backside Hannity continues to be: "Assessing how ‘open’ and ‘transparent’ Donald Trump Jr. was in his Hannity appearance"

Spoiler

Sean Hannity made a promise to his listeners on Tuesday night in advance of his interview with Donald Trump Jr., the first conversation with the president’s son since emails showing his willingness to collude with Russia against Hillary Clinton were reported by the New York Times.

That promise? “We will ask him every single question I can think of on this topic,” Hannity said.

If what was offered was the full extent of what he could think of, Hannity suffers from a distinct lack of imagination. After posing a series of non-challenging questions leavened with more critiques of the left and the media than any follow-up on Trump Jr.’s answers, the younger Trump emerged unscathed, as one might from a pillow fight.

Trump’s father offered a glowing review on Wednesday morning.

That’s a claim worth evaluating. Was the younger Donald Trump truly open and transparent? We transcribed Hannity’s questions and Trump Jr.’s answers so that we might evaluate the president’s assertion.

Hannity began simply.

HANNITY: Who is Rob Goldstone?

Trump Jr. answered that Goldstone is a promoter who represents a singer named Emin Agalarov, who his family met in 2013 while preparing for the Miss Universe pageant that year in Moscow.

From there, Hannity gets into the subject at hand. (You can read the emails at issue here, if you haven’t yet internalized them.)

HANNITY: He sends you this email. … This is the one that says, the crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father, meaning Emin’s father, and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with documents, it’s information that could incriminate Hillary Clinton, etc. Obviously highly sensitive information. But it’s part of Russia and its government’s support of Mr. Trump. And they ask the best way to handle this.

This email comes in. What are you thinking?

TRUMP JR.: Honestly, my takeaway when all of this is going on? Someone has information on our opponent. You know. Things are going a million miles an hour. You know what it’s like to be on a campaign. We’d just won Indiana but we’re talking about a contested convention. Things are going a million miles an hour again. And, hey, wait a minute. I’ve heard about all these things, but maybe this is something. I should hear him out.

There’s a key point here that Trump revisits throughout the race: This was a tumultuous moment, he implies, and he has less bandwidth than normal to parse what’s being presented to him.

For example, he says, “we’d just won Indiana” — suggesting that this was the moment at which anti-Trump forces were at their apex, hoping to block Trump from the nomination. But, in fact, the Indiana primary was a month before the first email sent by Goldstone offering to connect Trump to the Russians. A month was a very long time in 2016, as you may recall. What’s more, nearly two weeks before that first email, the Associated Press reported that Trump had clinched the Republican Party nomination by securing unpledged delegate commitments for the convention. Two days before the meeting, he made it official, winning the California and New Jersey primaries and giving him clearly enough delegates to be the nominee.

In other words, this was likely a moment of relative calm for a campaign that had been pressing hard since the previous June.

What’s more, it’s not as though Trump Jr. didn’t read the email. He clearly acknowledged that he understood what was being offered, replying that “we have some time and if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” He offers to have a call with Agalarov as soon as he’s back from traveling. More on this later.

HANNITY: When you read the parts about the Russian government or Russia supporting your father, did that put off any sirens in your head?

TRUMP JR.: Honestly, I don’t know. I mean, I think this was, again, just basic information that was going to be possibly there. I didn’t know these guys well enough to know if this talent manager from Miss Universe had this kind of thing so, you know. So I wanted to hear him out and play it out and see what happens. But, you know, people are trying to reach out to you all the time with this.

Trump is trying to downplay the email. This wasn’t information from a “talent manager from Miss Universe.” This is information from his client, who Trump knows to be someone of influence in Moscow.

HANNITY: So you spent a lot of time talking about it, and you actually said at one point, hey, if it turns out to say what you say it is … What did you think it might be?

TRUMP JR.: Listen, I’d been reading about scandals that people were probably underreporting for a long time. So maybe it was something that had to do with one of those things. I mean this was her, perhaps, involvement with the Russian government. Again, I didn’t know there was any credibility, I didn’t know there was anything behind it. I can’t vouch for the information.

Someone sent me an email! I can’t help what someone sends me. I read it. I responded accordingly, and I think if there was something interesting there, I think it’s pretty common.

This last line has justifiably been the subject of some mockery since it was released on Tuesday afternoon. It’s not as though Trump received the email and sent it to the trash. He took the bait! If someone got an email from a drug dealer offering his services and then replied with questions about pricing, you might be inclined to view that response as suggestive of guilt.

A broad theme of the interview, established at the outset by Hannity, was that all of this was a creation of the media. Trump plays into that here, too, as he will throughout his answers, suggesting that maybe this was one of an alleged glut of negative stories about Clinton that was never adequately reported. (Hannity focused on one such example on Tuesday.)

HANNITY: What about the timeline here? This is pre-, for example, WikiLeaks …

TRUMP JR.: Honestly, this is pre-Russia fever! This is pre-Russia mania. This is 13 months ago, before I think the rest of the world was talking about that, trying to build up this narrative about Russia. So, I don’t think my sirens went up — or the antennas went up at this time because it wasn’t the issue that it’s been made out to be over the last nine months, 10 months, since it really became a thing. So I think there’s an element of context to that. At the time, it wasn’t this big news story.

This was, in other words, before suspicion had been raised publicly about Russia’s efforts to influence the election that would formally begin the following month. It was before something alerted federal authorities to the possibility that the Trump campaign might be willing to help move those efforts forward. It was apparently at the outset of all of that.

HANNITY: What did you know about Emin, about Emin’s father? What did you know about them from Moscow. Was it just the pageant you met them at?

TRUMP JR.: They’re successful real estate developers over there. That’s the extent of my knowledge with them. I’ve met Emin once or twice, and maintained a casual relationship there, talked about some potential deals and that’s about the extent of it. They didn’t really go anywhere.

HANNITY: What do you know about this Russian lawyer? What did you at the time know?

TRUMP JR.: I actually didn’t know anything about it. An acquaintance sent me this email. As a courtesy to him I said, okay, let’s meet. But I didn’t know who I was meeting beforehand. Never heard of the person. Never got the information until they were in the room.

Two days before the meeting, Goldstone emails Trump to say that he will “send the names of the two people meeting with you for security when I have them later today.” Any email with those names was not included in what the Times reported or what Trump released publicly shortly before the Times story. (More on this below, too.) But clearly at some point someone at Trump Tower knew who was coming, otherwise they would not have gotten in.

HANNITY: At any point were you told, either in a phone conversation or otherwise, what they might tell you? What Goldstone seemed to be implying you would receive.

TRUMP JR.: As I recall, it was all basically this email coordination. Let’s try to set up a meeting and see what happens. It’s going to be interesting information. In the end, it wasn’t about that at all.

This is a very important point, which the emails themselves suggest is untrue:

• On June 6 at 3:03 p.m. Trump asks Goldstone to connect him with Agalarov by phone. This, from the outset, was his preferred way of handling things, asking in his first reply to set up a call.
• At 3:37 p.m. Goldstone asks what number to use.
• At 3:38, Trump says to have Agalarov call his cellphone.
• At 3:43, Goldstone says that Agalarov is performing in a concert, but can call in 20 minutes.
• At 4:38, Trump thanks Goldstone for his help.
• The next morning, Goldstone emails to say that Agalarov “asked that I schedule a meeting with you and the Russian Government attorney.”

It’s hard not to look at that timeline and not assume that Trump and Agalarov spoke by phone at some point between 4 and 4:30 on June 7. This is important not only because it undercuts Trump’s point above, but because it also suggests that Trump may have been convinced by Agalarov to take the meeting that Goldstone was tasked with setting up the next day.

Hannity then mentions a “Today” show interview with the attorney at issue, Natalia Veselnitskaya. In that interview, she explains what happened at the meeting on June 9.

HANNITY: Did she describe it accurately?

TRUMP JR.: Fairly accurately. I was a little taken aback by her saying, talking about me pressing for the information. But as you can see from the emails, the pretext for the meeting was, hey, we have information. There was some small talk, I don’t even remember what it was. It just was sort of nonsensical and garbled and it quickly went on to a story about Russian adoption and how we could help.

Veselnitskaya wanted to talk about adoption because this was Vladimir Putin’s retribution for the passage of a bill leveling sanctions against Russia called the Magnitsky Act. Her work in Washington focused on getting the law overturned. One carrot she used in doing so was to note that repeal of the Magnitsky Act would mean that Russia would again allow Americans to adopt Russian children.

HANNITY: Did you even know what the Magnitsky Act was?

TRUMP JR.: I’d never even heard of it before that day. I think it became pretty apparent to Jared and Paul who — I think Jared left after a few minutes. Paul got on the phone.

HANNITY: She said that.

TRUMP JR.: Yeah, this is her account. We were all there. I was basically sitting there listening as a courtesy to my acquaintance who had set up the meeting and, in his own words, you can hear what he said about it. He apologized to me walking out of the meeting basically for wasting my time.

Trump appears to want to reinforce how little he remembers about the meeting by suggesting that the details about who did what came from the attorney, not him. It makes sense as a strategy: He will later insist that he barely remembers the meeting at all since it was so unhelpful.

HANNITY: He did say at the end of the statement today, you did point out, “as Goldstone said today, ‘The whole meeting was the most inane nonsense I’ve ever heard. And I’m actually agitated about it.’ He called and apologized to you?

TRUMP JR.: There wasn’t really follow-up because there was nothing to follow up. But as we were walking out, he said, listen, I’m sorry for that. He sort of goosed up, he puffed up, there was some puffery to the email perhaps to get the meeting, to make it happen. In the end, there was probably some bait-and-switch about what it was really supposed to be about. There is nothing there.

HANNITY: She is saying she had no information to provide. Do you remember when she suggested you were pressing her a little bit for information.

TRUMP JR.: I imagine I did. I was probably pressing because the pretext of the meeting was, hey, I have information about your opponent. It was this, hey, some DNC donors may have done something in Russia and they didn’t pay taxes. I was like, what does this have to do with anything. Especially in light of everything that was out there. I was like, this isn’t …

Trump’s overall defense centers on his argument that there was no anti-Clinton dirt to receive, which the above exchange centers on. It’s a nifty rhetorical trick, moving from his “I love it” response to the offer of dirt from the Russian government to “but there was no dirt!”

To extend our drug-dealer analogy above, this is like a guy showing up at a buy, money in hand, and arguing that there weren’t even any drugs to buy.

HANNITY: Did you ever have any contact with this woman again?

TRUMP JR.: No.

HANNITY: Did you ever have any contact with Goldstone again?

TRUMP JR.: Casual. Hey, how’s it going, Emin’s going to be in town performing. Something like that.

HANNITY: Did you ever see Emin again?

TRUMP JR.: I don’t think so, no. I don’t think I’ve seen Emin since this transpired.

Hannity here is carrying Trump’s water, helping to reinforce that this was the end of the interaction.

HANNITY: At any point in your mind, did Don Jr. have a siren saying, okay, they’re talking — again I go back to the first email — about Russia, Russian government, I meeting this person, we’re going to talk on the phone. Did you ever think that maybe this might not be …

TRUMP JR.: Look. In retrospect, I probably would have done things a little differently. Again, this is before the Russia-mania. This is before they were building it up in the press. For me this was opposition research. They had something, maybe concrete evidence to all the stories that I’d been hearing about that were probably underreported for years, not just during the campaign.

But, really, it went nowhere, and it was apparent that was not what the meeting was really about.

Veterans of political campaigns have made clear that this was not a normal process for conducting opposition research.

...

HANNITY: Did you ever meet with any other person from Russia that you know?

TRUMP JR.: I don’t even now. I’ve probably met with other people from Russia. Not in the context of a formalized meeting or anything like that. Because: Why would I? In the grand scheme of things, how busy we were? It was much more important to do than this. This was a courtesy to an acquaintance.

The “why would I” comment is pretty remarkable, given that his previous answer explained precisely why he would: If he thought they might offer negative information on Clinton. That’s why he took this meeting, as he argues throughout the interview.

At least when he’s not arguing that he only took the meeting as a favor to Goldstone.

At this point, Hannity showed a montage of Democratic politicians criticizing Trump.

HANNITY: Did you hand over any and all documents?

TRUMP JR.: Well, I will. I’ve said it publicly, I said it yesterday. More than happy to cooperate with everyone. I just want the truth to get out there. That’s part of why I released all the stuff today. I wanted to get it all out there.

They’re trying to drag out the story, Sean. In all fairness. They have it. They want to drip a little bit today, drip a little bit then. So I was like, here it is! I’m more than happy to be transparent about it and I’m more than happy to cooperate with everyone.

This is deeply disingenuous.

First of all, Trump released his email chain on Twitter solely to undercut a story that he knew was coming imminently from the Times. According to the paper’s reporters, they asked him for comment before an 11 a.m. deadline; he posted the emails at 11 on the nose. As the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg put it on Twitter (inadvertently reinforcing our running metaphor):

...

What’s more, the story ran over multiple days precisely because Trump wasn’t forthcoming about it. In his first statement to the Times’ first report about the meeting, he said:

It was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up.

That’s appears to all be true — but it’s hardly a full, transparent depiction of what happened.

HANNITY: So as far as you know, as far as this incident is concerned, this is all of it?

TRUMP JR.: This is everything. This is everything.

HANNITY: Was anybody else at any point in the campaign said, oh, I’ve got information about Hillary that you remember?

TRUMP JR.: No.

Again, Hannity helps to nudge the door shut.

Notice, by the way, that Hannity hasn’t challenged Trump on any of his claims. Not the release of the emails. Not the call with Agalarov. Not the names that were given to security. Not the timing of the meeting.

All of these things were readily obvious to those paying attention to how the story unfolded on Tuesday. Hannity ignored them.

HANNITY: Let me go back to what Tim Kaine said [in the montage]. Well, if it is what you said it is, especially you’d want it released in the summer. Do you think that’s unusual for a campaign to want opp research …?

TRUMP JR.: Well, like I said, I think we had more important things to worry about. I wasn’t sure about the credibility of any of this stuff. At the time, I’m sitting there, Indiana had probably just happened. I’m worried about hearing, contested convention, contested convention. So we’re in a fight. This is the first time we’ve ever done any of this. I’m still way in the learning curve on all of this. So it wasn’t that urgent to me, if I’m saying it can wait until the end of summer.

But, obviously, I want to hear the information. That’s what we do in business. If there’s information out there we want it, and then we make what we do with it. If there was something that came from it that was shady, if it was a danger to national security, I would obviously bring it right to someone. But I didn’t know what anything was. Turns out, it was nothing! And therefore there is nothing to be able to actually talk about.

We addressed this “Indiana just happened” claim above.

More interesting here is this: “If there was something that came from it that was shady, if it was a danger to national security, I would obviously bring it right to someone.”

Some might consider an offer of dirt from the Russian government by way of a pop star’s agent somewhat shady.

HANNITY: The whole contact took how long? How long was the meeting.

TRUMP JR.: Twenty minutes.

HANNITY: And Jared left after five or 10, as she said?

TRUMP JR.: Yes.

HANNITY: And Paul Manafort was …

TRUMP JR.: … on his phone.

HANNITY: The whole time?

TRUMP JR.: Pretty much. Listen, like I said, it became pretty apparent that this was not what we were in there talking about.

Notice that, this time, Trump doesn’t attribute these details to the attorney.

HANNITY: A lot of people are going to want to know this about your father. Did you tell your father anything about this?

TRUMP JR.: No. It was such a nothing, there was nothing to tell. I mean, I wouldn’t even have remembered it until you start scouring through the stuff. It was literally just a wasted 20 minutes, which was a shame.

Ten seconds earlier he remembered what Paul Manafort was doing in the meeting. Now he says he would never have remembered it at all. Do with that what you will.

At this point, Hannity asks an off-topic question giving Trump a chance to bash the media. He then continues:

HANNITY: Anyone in your team, I guess you have a staff of people who work for you, did anyone research the lawyer or anyone involved in this?

TRUMP JR.: No, well, again, we didn’t know who it was before the meeting. Apparently she’s a prosecutor in Moscow who hasn’t done that since 2002. Fourteen years ago, at the time of the meeting, she was a prosecutor. It was such a nothing, I literally wouldn’t have remembered the meeting.

HANNITY: Were you annoyed, based on …

TRUMP JR.: It was a waste of time. But sometimes you do things differently for acquaintances and friends.

HANNITY: If the meeting resulted in information that you felt in any way was illegal or compromising or collusion to use the media’s term?

TRUMP JR.: I said it earlier: 100 percent, I would bring it to the proper authorities. There’s nothing that I would do to ever endanger this community. I think the reason we fought so hard during this campaign, whether it was my father and the work that he put into it, whether it was the rest of our family and the efforts that we put into it — and you know those efforts well.

We’d do anything for this country. We’re never going to put this country in jeopardy. Ever.

The most important part of this interview came right at the end.

“You know those efforts well.”

As soon as Trump says this, he appears to catch himself a little. After all, it’s not that helpful to, mid-interview, remind viewers that the journalist asking the questions advised and endorsed the politician at the center of the dispute.

...

From there, the interview is basically over. Hannity offers a few other cleanup questions. No other emails on this subject. No follow-up. One last question about Clinton and Ukraine that wasn’t worth asking.

But before that, Hannity announces that his job is complete.

“I wanted to ask every question I could think of regarding this issue,” he says. “I can’t think of any more, in all honesty.”

Another interviewer probably could. Which is why Trump Jr. wasn’t subjected to another interviewer.

"We'd do anything for this country. We're never going to put this country in jeopardy. Ever." Yeah, I believe that. NOT.

[GrumpyGran]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

It was this, hey, some DNC donors may have done something in Russia and they didn’t pay taxes.

Oh, these people and their uncontrollable projection! Donnie J, I'm sure Daddy has told you over and over not to talk about the money he has taken from Russia that he didn't pay taxes on.

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"We'd do anything for this country. We're never going to put this country in jeopardy. Ever."

"We"d do anything for our companies. We're never going to put our companies in jeopardy. Ever"

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, GrumpyGran said:

Also funny that this woman bait-and-switch'ed them.

This is what Fredo says. And we all know we can't trust what he says, not even in the slightest. Yesterday's story will be will be different today, and will change from the one told today once tomorrow comes along.

I believe that a whole lot of information was presented to them during that meeting. Not given, but shown to be in possession of the Russians, and that it was dangled as bait in front of them. They bit reedily and eagerly, hook, line and sinker.

And from that moment on, Putin has them all in his pocket.

[fraurosena]

WaPo has done annotations with Fredo's emails. I can't copy the text with annotations so you'll have to click on the link to see them.

Quote

Donald Trump Jr. posted his full exchange with a publicist for a Russian pop musician to Twitter on Tuesday, and the emails confirm previous reports that Trump Jr. was offered compromising information about Hillary Clinton specifically from the Russian government. The emails also say flatly that the Kremlin was working to help elect his father — claims which Trump Jr., his father and the White House would deny for months afterward.

Some have suggested that they represent a smoking gun when it comes to collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. The White House denies there was any collusion.

Donald Trump Jr.’s full emails about meeting a ‘Russian government attorney,’ annotated

 

[fraurosena]

I am fervently hoping this will happen!

 

Please, dear Rufus, please... 

Wow, it seems like it is!!!

The Latest: Senate Judiciary head wants Trump Jr. to testify

Quote

The Latest on President Donald Trump and the investigation into his campaign’s potential ties to Russia (all times local):

12:10 a.m.

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee says he’s sending a letter to Donald Trump Jr. to ask him to testify.

Sen. Chuck Grassley says he’d subpoena the president’s eldest son if necessary. The Iowa Republican says he wants Trump Jr. to appear “pretty soon,” and it could be as early as next week.

Trump Jr. released emails this week from 2016 in which he appeared eager to accept information from the Russian government that could have damaged Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The panel is investigating Russian meddling in the U.S. election. Grassley wouldn’t say what he wants to hear from the president’s eldest son, but said members aren’t restricted “from asking anything they want to ask.”

___

11:40 a.m.

The Justice Department has released a heavily blacked out page from Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ security clearance application.

The document has become public in response to a government watchdog group’s lawsuit.

The application page asks whether Sessions — a senator before joining the Trump administration — or anyone in his immediate family had contact within the past seven years with a foreign government or its representatives.

There’s a “no” listed, but the rest of the answer is blacked out.

The department has acknowledged that Sessions — on his form — omitted meetings he had with foreign dignitaries, including the Russian ambassador.

A department spokesman says the FBI agent who helped with the form said those encounters didn’t have to be included as routine contacts as part of Sessions’ Senate duties.

 

Edited July 13, 2017 by fraurosena
update

[onekidanddone]

Senate panel asking Trump Jr. to testify

Maybe they will be so busy with TT Jr, they won't vote on health care. Wishful thinking I know, but I'm in a panic about the vote.

Quote

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is inviting Donald Trump Jr. to publicly testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about his meeting with a Russian lawyer offering compromising information on Hillary Clinton, according to multiple reports.

Grassley will send Trump Jr. a letter on Thursday asking him to appear before the committee, according to CNN.

A spokesman for the Judiciary Committee chairman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter. It would mark the first formal, public invitation for President Trump's eldest son to meet with lawmakers, who have been clamoring to hear from him about his June 2016 meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

Trump Jr. was told ahead of the meeting that it was about “very high level and sensitive information" and "is part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, told reporters earlier this week that she wanted Trump Jr. to publicly testify before the committee.

"This is aired on front page newspapers. It should be aired front-page [in the] United States Senate. The committee of jurisdiction is clearly the Judiciary Committee," she told reporters. “It’s not an Intelligence matter.”

She added to CNN on Thursday that she wanted Trump Jr. to testify as soon as next week.

The Senate Judiciary Committee can subpoena Trump Jr. if he refuses to testify voluntarily. Under committee rules, they can issue a subpoena either when Feinstein and Grassley get an agreement or by a vote of the full committee.

Members of the Senate and House intelligence committees have also said they want to meet with Trump Jr., though neither have publicly invited him.

Grassley and Feinstein have also warned that they are willing to subpoena Paul Manafort to testify before their committee. Manafort, who was Trump's campaign chairman at the time, and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner also attended the 2016 meeting.

 

 

[nokidsmom]

First on a lighter note, I have to say this: Eric's hair, I can't get over Eric's hair.   He seems to pick the worst styles for himself, I think there has been only one picture I have seen where he had it in a style that actually worked for him. 

Getting back to Jr., I can't believe how dumb this family is turning out to be.    Somehow I expected all of them to be smarter than this.  I don't believe for a second that all of them haven't had their fingers in some serious shit be it their Dad's campaign or whatever, Money can't buy you brains, I guess.   The only ones not involved in any shenanigans are probably Melania and of course, Barron. 

Barron, play very close attention, and take what's happening as lessons in what not to do, the first one being get out from under your Dad's shadow.  He may be your Dad but he's kryptonite.

[Childless]

6 minutes ago, nokidsmom said:

First on a lighter note, I have to say this: Eric's hair, I can't get over Eric's hair.   He seems to pick the worst styles for himself, I think there has been only one picture I have seen where he had it in a style that actually worked for him. 

Getting back to Jr., I can't believe how dumb this family is turning out to be.    Somehow I expected all of them to be smarter than this.  I don't believe for a second that all of them haven't had their fingers in some serious shit be it their Dad's campaign or whatever, Money can't buy you brains, I guess.   The only ones not involved in any shenanigans are probably Melania and of course, Barron. 

Barron, play very close attention, and take what's happening as lessons in what not to do, the first one being get out from under your Dad's shadow.  He may be your Dad but he's kryptonite.

Ha!  Melania may be the smartest of the bunch.  Sit back and let them all sink themselves and then take over the business and the money.  Maybe that's why she decided to stay in NYC.  Distance herself from the shenanigans and hope she can escape the consequences.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Bungled collusion is still collusion"

Spoiler

The Russia scandal has entered a new phase, and there’s no going back.

For six months, the White House claimed that this scandal was nothing more than innuendo about Trump campaign collusion with Russia in meddling in the 2016 election. Innuendo for which no concrete evidence had been produced.

Yes, there were several meetings with Russian officials, some only belatedly disclosed. But that is circumstantial evidence at best. Meetings tell you nothing unless you know what happened in them. We didn’t. Some of these were casual encounters in large groups, like the famous July 2016 Kislyak-Sessions exchange of pleasantries at the Republican National Convention. Big deal.

I was puzzled. Lots of coverup, but where was the crime? Not even a third-rate burglary. For six months, smoke without fire. Yes, President Trump himself was acting very defensively, as if he were hiding something. But no one ever produced the something.

My view was: Collusion? I just don’t see it. But I’m open to empirical evidence. Show me.

The evidence is now shown. This is not hearsay, not fake news, not unsourced leaks. This is an email chain released by Donald Trump Jr. himself. A British go-between writes that there’s a Russian government effort to help Trump Sr. win the election, and as part of that effort he proposes a meeting with a “Russian government attorney” possessing damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Moreover, the Kremlin is willing to share troves of incriminating documents from the Crown Prosecutor. (Error: Britain has a Crown Prosecutor. Russia has a Prosecutor General.)

Donald Jr. emails back. “I love it.” Fatal words.

Once you’ve said “I’m in,” it makes no difference that the meeting was a bust, that the intermediary brought no such goods. What matters is what Donald Jr. thought going into the meeting, as well as Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, who were forwarded the correspondence, invited to the meeting, and attended.

“It was literally just a wasted 20 minutes, which was a shame,” Donald Jr. told Sean Hannity. A shame? On the contrary, a stroke of luck. Had the lawyer real stuff to deliver, Donald Jr. and the others would be in far deeper legal trouble. It turned out to be incompetent collusion, amateur collusion, comically failed collusion. That does not erase the fact that three top Trump campaign officials were ready to play.

It may turn out that they did later collaborate more fruitfully. We don’t know. But even if nothing else is found, the evidence is damning.

It’s rather pathetic to hear Trump apologists protesting that it’s no big deal because we Americans are always intervening in other people’s elections, and they in ours. You don’t have to go back to the ’40s and ’50s when the CIA intervened in France and Italy to keep the communists from coming to power. What about the Obama administration’s blatant interference to try to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu in the latest Israeli election? One might even add the work of groups supported by the U.S. during Russian parliamentary elections — the very origin of Vladimir Putin’s deep animus toward Clinton, then secretary of state, whom he accuses of having orchestrated the opposition.

This defense is pathetic for two reasons. First, have the Trumpites not been telling us for six months that no collusion ever happened? And now they say: Sure it happened. So what? Everyone does it.

What’s left of your credibility when you make such a casual about-face?

Second, no, not everyone does it. It’s one thing to be open to opposition research dug up in Indiana. But not dirt from Russia, a hostile foreign power that has repeatedly invaded its neighbors (Georgia, Crimea, eastern Ukraine), that buzzes our planes and ships in international waters, that opposes our every move and objective around the globe. Just last week the Kremlin killed additional U.N. sanctions we were looking to impose on North Korea for its ICBM test.

There is no statute against helping a foreign hostile power meddle in an American election. What Donald Jr. — and Kushner and Manafort — did may not be criminal. But it is not merely stupid. It is also deeply wrong, a fundamental violation of any code of civic honor.

I leave it to the lawyers to adjudicate the legalities of unconsummated collusion. But you don’t need a lawyer to see that the Trump defense — collusion as a desperate Democratic fiction designed to explain away a lost election — is now officially dead.

It's getting hotter and hotter.

[mamallama]

I'm also calling bullshit on it being bungled.  For monthes Trump (all of them) denied any meetings took place and they lied.  I see no reason (I accidently  typed treason) to believe their narrative of what took place at the meeting.

[nokidsmom]

2 hours ago, Childless said:

 Melania may be the smartest of the bunch.

I am thinking there's really something to her staying in the background and being low key.   And staying in New York for as long as she could.  This is not shyness or natural reserve which she appears to have but that is not the reason for her low profile.   She might have foreseen that her husband being president would be, in her husband's own words, a disaster.  She doesn't want a part of it and never did.  And she's doing whatever she can to keep her son out of it as much as possible.  I don't blame her.   I suspect Melania is walking a tightrope between protecting herself and her son while still appearing privately supportive of her husband and family.  

ETA:  Given the many reports of how the Great Leader (not!) is in a near constant state of anger / frustration at the WH, I can see why Melania would want to stay far away from that.   And not have her son exposed to it either.   I know she and Barron have moved in, but maybe she's betting it won't be for long. 

Edited July 14, 2017 by nokidsmom
Addition

[GreyhoundFan]

"The Troublemaker:The same qualities that made Donald Trump Jr. his father’s political heir may have put him at the center of the latest scandal."

Spoiler

Many years ago, when his eldest son was still a boy, Donald Trump was interviewed by Barbara Walters, along with his family. Which child, she asked the real-estate mogul, did he consider the troublemaker in the family?

Trump didn’t hesitate for a moment. “Don,” he shot back, according to the story Don himself—Donald Trump Jr., now a 39-year-old businessman—loves to tell. Don Jr. told me the story with a grin when I interviewed him for a profile last year. “I was the wild one of the three,” he said of his siblings. “I always made good grades and did well, but I had a lot of fun.”

Brash, strong-willed, risk-taking: These qualities made Don Jr. the most visible of the Trump children during the campaign. But this week’s revelations—the June 2016 email exchange, published Tuesday, in which Don, presented with potential campaign assistance from a supportive Russian government, replied, “I love it”—cast those same qualities in a different light. Once again, Don Jr. is his father’s troublemaker, but this time the trouble is much more than fun and games.

On Wednesday, I texted Don and asked how he was doing. “Fantastic,” he wrote back—followed by the “laughing crying” emoji. He declined to comment further.

His father’s foray into politics brought Don a new kind of fame that he clearly relished. While Ivanka and Eric and Jared, the other members of the Trump brain trust, mostly exerted influence behind the scenes, Don stormed into the spotlight. “He seems to have a very natural political instinct,” Donald Trump, the father, told me last year. Don’s knack for politics pleased his father, who described his eldest son as the best “salesman” of his children. (Eric’s strength, he said, was construction, while Ivanka’s was her imagination.) “People like him a lot. People have great trust in him,” he said.

Don’s feisty Twitter presence and aggressive television interviews made him a hero to the alt-right and the Trump base. An electrifying speech to last summer’s Republican convention stoked rumblings that he might follow his dad into elected office, perhaps by running for mayor of New York City or governor of New York state. Don clearly relished the idea: “The politics bug bit me,” he reportedly told a gun club in April. Going back to business for the rest of his life after the exhilaration of 2016 would be “boring.”

Under different circumstances, in a more successful Trump administration, this could have been Don Jr.’s moment—the emergence of a potential political heir, perhaps even a second President Trump in the making. Instead, Don is the radioactive center of the controversy that’s consuming his father’s presidency, and his no-holds-barred zealotry looks more like downright recklessness—if not something more sinister.

The Russia emails, as Don described them to Sean Hannity on Tuesday, were the product of a son who just wanted to do whatever it took to help his father. He had thrown himself into the campaign from the start, finding the political arena a good showcase for his intense and combative personality. Ivanka got the most buzz, but her few campaign appearances were carefully choreographed; Don was the one who was out there on television and Twitter and on the stump, loudly defending his father—and bashing his opponents—at every turn.

It was Don, too, who best embodied his father’s particular brand of conservatism, unlike Ivanka, a supposed moderate who was always trying to sand off her dad’s rough edges. Don was all about the rough edges. He was the rough edges. He didn’t much care about social issues, but he loved guns, and he argued forcefully for the proposed Muslim ban and border wall. In one campaign controversy, he compared Syrian refugees to Skittles; in another, he was interviewed by a white supremacist radio host—unwittingly, he said. In March, Don went after the mayor of London, who is Muslim, as a terrorist attack was unfolding in that city. In his amplification of alt-right memes and pugilistic responses to controversy, Don could seem like a more instinctive proponent of Trumpism than even President Trump himself.

But Don wasn’t always his father’s Mini-Me. An angry and petulant youth, he actually didn’t fully buy into Trumphood until after college. Don had been a preteen when his parents’ separation and divorce began to consume the New York tabloids. After his mother, Ivana, got full custody, he left for boarding school and didn’t speak to his dad for a whole year. In college, at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Don was known mostly for drinking and picking fights. He didn’t care about being one of the cool kids, a contemporary told New York magazine, but he had the hottest girlfriend.

After graduation, Don moved to Colorado, where he worked as a bartender, fly-fished, and ski-bummed for more than a year. He wanted to make sure he didn’t wake up in the family business 10 years down the road full of regret about the road not taken. But after a while, he hankered for a faster-paced world. He returned to New York, quit drinking, and started to act like a Trump. By the time his father ran for president, he was brokering hotel deals and co-hosting The Apprentice.

The campaign, like the Trump Organization, was a family affair. Don was in the inner circle. It was Don who broke the news to Trump’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, that he was being fired. Don was the most comfortable of the children on the hustings, introducing his father at rallies and stumping for him solo. (I met him when Don and Eric hosted a Super Bowl party at a Buffalo Wild Wings in Manchester, New Hampshire, just before that state’s primary.) Whatever ambivalence he might once have had about his birthright was gone—Don wanted to win.

Last month, when the former FBI director James Comey testified before the Senate, President Trump stayed quiet, but his namesake wasn’t about to let the family’s newest enemy off the hook. Don rebutted Comey in real time on Twitter, jeering, jousting, and picking apart Comey’s testimony. He questioned Comey’s “character,” accused him of leaking, and declared the whole investigation “10 months of nonsense whose only apparent goal was to take down #POTUS & stop him from doing what he was elected to do.”

Don was in his element—the taunter, the brawler, the freelance troll. In politics, the Trump family troublemaker had found his perfect niche. But now he may have earned a very different role: the fall guy. The New York Post editorial board rendered the most brutal verdict on the would-be political savant in a headline in Wednesday’s paper. “Donald Trump Jr.,” it proclaimed, “is an idiot.”

Yeah, I think the NY Post is correct.

[GrumpyGran]

4 hours ago, mamallama said:

I'm also calling bullshit on it being bungled.  For monthes Trump (all of them) denied any meetings took place and they lied.  I see no reason (I accidently  typed treason) to believe their narrative of what took place at the meeting.

Well, since it seems every hour someone new is saying they were in the meeting... This is wild, just wild.

[GreyhoundFan]

1 minute ago, GrumpyGran said:

Well, since it seems every hour someone new is saying they were in the meeting.

I know, right? I keep thinking the next attendee announced will be Rufus.

[GrumpyGran]

Just now, GreyhoundFan said:

I know, right? I keep thinking the next attendee announced will be Rufus.

I swear by dinner time, Charles Manson's going to be claiming he was there. WTH. Hubby's going to the store for steaks and red wine(sorry @GreyhoundFan). Everybody hold on, I think the ride has started!

[GreyhoundFan]

Well, well, well...Fredo is making the cover of the New Yorker less than a week after making the cover of Time. This time, he's one of the Three Stooges. "Donald Trump Jr. gets ‘grounded’ by Dad on next week’s New Yorker cover"

Spoiler

... <cover is shown in the article -- it's good!>

AND HERE comes Donald Trump Jr., bringing up the ‘ear.

Last we saw The New Yorker’s Barry Blitt rendering judgment on the White House with flighted fancy, the oft-viral cover artist was depicting Attorney General Jeff Sessions dragging ousted FBI boss James Comey through the aisle, United Airlines-style, for “Ejected.”

Now, for next week’s issue, Blitt has painted the Stooge-inspired “Grounded,” in which President Trump has a lock on the lobe on Donnie Jr. (and boots son-in-law Jared Kushner) amid revelations of a Russian meeting last summer — a Trump Tower campaign sit-down confirmed by Trump the Younger’s own tweets.

At this rate, Blitt could illustrate major events of the administration entirely through aerial metaphors, with such future cover titles as “The Plane Dealer,” “Air Farce One” and “covFAA.” Till then, DT Junior remains his latest err-brushed figure of editorial satire.

Blitt, in illuminating “Grounded,” aptly references a Russian: “Tolstoy said that ‘happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ Somehow this seems to apply to the Trumps, particularly lately.”

At the beginning of the week, Françoise Mouly, the magazine’s art editor, was looking forward to a non-Trump illustration. That was Before Junior.

“We had a nice summer image in place, and were delighted not to have to think about yet another Trump cover,” Mouly tells The Post’s Comic Riffs. “But as Junior kept widening his revelations, it became more and more inevitable that an image should mark the moment.

“Barry Blitt felt that the story was about dumbness at the highest level,” Mouly continues, “and when he proposed to depict the president in a Three Stooges mode, we knew we had the apt metaphor for what we’re living through.”

A sampling of Blitt’s recent political covers:

...

 

[fraurosena]

Sorry, not Rufus @GreyhoundFan. His holiness is too good for that sort of thing.

However... Seth Abramson knows who it was.

 

The Daily Beast has an article that mentions him.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Seriously? "Trump campaign paid firm of lawyer representing Trump Jr. before emails were made public"

Spoiler

President Trump’s campaign committee made a payment to the law firm of an attorney representing Donald Trump Jr. last month, nearly two weeks before it was announced that the same attorney would be representing the president's son in Russia-related probes, according to a new campaign finance report filed Saturday.

The committee reported in the filing to the Federal Election Commission that it paid $50,000 to the law firm of attorney Alan Futerfas on June 27. That payment was made 13 days before it was publicly revealed that Futerfas would represent Trump's eldest son in the Russia investigations.

News of the payment came as controversy has swirled in recent days around Trump Jr. and a meeting he held in June 2016 with a Kremlin-connected lawyer who was said to have potentially damaging information about Hillary Clinton, the Democratic opponent of Trump's father in the presidential election.

The filing also revealed that the campaign committee paid the Trump Corporation — a company being run by Trump Jr. and his brother, Eric — more than $89,000 on June 30 for “legal consulting.” While the campaign committee has reimbursed Trump entities for services such as rent, air travel and hotel expenses in the past, it has not reported payments for legal fees, according to Federal Election Commission data.

Futerfas did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Saturday regarding the payment to his law firm and when he began representing Trump Jr. On July 10, two days after Trump Jr.'s meeting was publicly revealed by the New York Times, Futerfas confirmed that he was hired to represent him but did not say when that took place.

Trump Jr. has offered a series of evolving explanations for his meeting with the Russian lawyer — also attended by Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law and senior aide, and Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chair — since it was first made public.

He first said the meeting was about adoptions, then acknowledged it was set up with someone who might have useful information for his father's campaign. On Tuesday, Trump Jr. publicly released an email exchange showing that he was promised incriminating “high level” information on Clinton as “part of Russia and its government's support for” his father.

Trump Jr. had previously said he held no meetings with Russians while “representing the campaign in any way, shape or form,” and called “disgusting” the suggestion that Russia was attempting to help his father's presidential campaign. U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia sought to help elect Trump, a determination the president has publicly questioned, and Congress and a special counsel are investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

New details have continued to emerge about Trump Jr.'s meeting, including the revelation this week that a Russian-American lobbyist and Soviet military veteran was there. Futerfas has said the meeting was insignificant, telling The Washington Post in an interview Friday that recalling who attended this gathering was difficult because of how unimportant it was and the time that has passed.

“The frustrating part of all this for me is that this meeting occurred 13 months ago,” he said. “There is no record, no list of who was there. It was not a memorable meeting for anyone. Now 13 months later, everyone expects we should have a perfect recollection.”

The White House has tried to play down the meeting's significance. While speaking with reporters on Air Force One during a flight to Paris late Wednesday, Trump defended his son and dismissed the meeting, which he said he had learned about earlier in the week. Trump said that most people who work in politics “are going to take that meeting.”

“He's a good boy,” Trump said of his 39-year-old son. “He's a good kid. And he had a meeting, nothing happened with the meeting. It was a short meeting as he told me — because I only heard about it two or three days ago.”

The filing Saturday also showed that the campaign committee paid legal fees to Jones Day, which served as the campaign’s principal law firm throughout the election. It was paid $538,265 between early May and late June, according to the new filing.

The campaign committee did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the payments to Futerfas or the Trump Organization, nor did Alan Garten, the chief legal officer at the company.

Earlier this year, Trump's campaign committee was asked by the Senate Intelligence Committee to gather and produce Russia-related documents, emails and phone records, drawing the political group into the investigation.

The huge legal outlays by Trump's campaign committee came during a period in which it has been repeatedly tapping his small donor base for contributions, exhorting them in emails and text messages to give money to help the president fight the political establishment and “fake news.”

Trump supporters poured $13.4 million into three Trump committees between April 1 and June 30, including $5.9 million that went to his principal campaign committee. During the same period, that committee spent $4.37 million, including $677,000 on legal expenses.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"If Donald Jr. acts as a proxy for his dad, who’s accountable for the Russia meeting?"

Spoiler

Over the past week, President Trump seemed unusually subdued as the nation absorbed the news that his oldest child, Donald Jr., last year exulted in the prospect of getting derogatory information about Hillary Clinton from the Russian government. His son, the president said, “is a high-quality person,” “a wonderful young man.” It wasn’t until the end of the week that Trump defended his son’s decision to meet with the Russian lawyer who supposedly had the dirt: “Most people would have taken that meeting.”

There was simply no way this president was going to distance himself from his son’s actions, as he often does when a White House aide displeases him. In business and now in politics, Trump reserves his most effusive praise and his deepest trust for his flesh and blood, handing Ivanka a White House portfolio and his boys the run of the Trump enterprises.

Through the years, Trump has spoken about Donald Jr. very much as he describes himself: as a smart, ambitious, crafty guy who loves to win and has a mischievous streak that sometimes gets him in trouble. The president talks about his other adult children in similar ways. Ask about his kids, and Trump talks about how they’re like him — Ivanka, for example, has his business savvy and, as he once put it in an interview, his interest in sex.

Some psychologists have concluded that Trump sees his adult children as extensions of himself. “They are his world because they are him,” said Elan Golomb, a psychologist who wrote “Trapped in the Mirror: Adult Children of Narcissists in Their Struggle for Self .” “They don’t exist as separate entities. To a narcissist, the child is seen as ‘me.’ ”

Even his children agree that there is little separation between them and their celebrity father. “We’ve all made peace with the fact that we will never be able to achieve any level of autonomy ” from him, Ivanka told an interviewer in 2004. No wonder Trump places them in positions of power.

But the same instinct that induced the president to have Ivanka sit in for him briefly at the Group of 20 talks in Hamburg this month makes it difficult for him to distance himself from them or contradict them, as he often has when his staff advisers leave him angry or disappointed. Which raises this question: When Trump Jr. walked into that meeting to get the dirt on Clinton from the Russian lawyer, was he by default acting on his father’s behalf?

Presidents’ relatives have long served as distraction, embarrassment and vital support. President Jimmy Carter had to cope with an occasionally wayward brother, Billy. President Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother Roger for a cocaine distribution conviction . At the other end of the scale, President John F. Kennedy relied on his brother Bobby as his attorney general and close adviser, and George W. Bush served a similar, though informal, role as counselor to his father, President George H.W. Bush.

But Trump is the first president who has arrived in office with his children as his most important and trusted advisers. Last year, when I asked Trump whom he would turn to in a moment of great crisis, he said it would not be any close friends — his friendships were mainly just business relationships, he said — but rather his adult children. “One thing I get a lot of credit for is my children,” he said. “They’re good children. And they’ve been smart. They went to great schools. Always got top-of-the line marks. . . . I get along with my children a lot.”

Trump grew up in a tight-knit family business. Groomed to take over Fred Trump’s New York real estate empire, Donald has always spoken of his father more as a businessman than as a parent. He has a standard few pat lines about Fred: He praises his father as an accomplished builder and role model who, alas, lacked his son’s unbridled ambition to play on the biggest stages. Trump has little to say about his mother, other than that he got his showmanship gene from her.

But ask Trump about his adult children, and a notoriously nonlinear storyteller suddenly grows effusive. The president virtually melts at any mention of Ivanka, and he rushes to defend her from criticism, as he did this month after the kerfuffle about the G-20 meeting. He exhibits a charming pride about sons Donald Jr. and Eric, repeatedly saying that his business is secure in their hands.

The Trump children know this role and accept it. Ivanka told Politico that what her father cared about when they were growing up was “respect. You would never hear us yelling at our parents or using a tone that was inappropriate or disrespectful. Even a tone.”

“Everything we’ve ever done, we’ve done as a family,” Eric told The Washington Post last year. “Every project we’ve ever built, we’ve built as a family. ‘The Apprentice’ we did as a family.”

President Trump has written about the importance of narcissism in his success and in the achievements of any business leader. He believes that an emphasis on his own ego not only promotes his brand, but gives him the confidence and standing to achieve more. And psychologists who study narcissism say such people often view their children as mirrors of themselves.

“The main issue with narcissists is that ‘people have to 100 percent agree with me about everything,’ ” Golomb said. “ ‘They have to be on my side.’ And they often are: Usually the parent is so fearful of criticism coming his way that he makes the child fearful of ever expressing their misery. They have to agree with and support the narcissistic parent.”

Which may explain why Trump often speaks of his children and his parents through the prism of his own life. At his father’s funeral, Trump talked mainly about himself. His siblings told stories about their father; Donald instead recited a list of his accomplishments, noting that his father had stood by him at each turn.

Gwenda Blair, the author of “The Trumps,” a multi-generational study of the family, concluded that Donald, his father, Fred, and his grandfather Friedrich Trump had a foundational similarity: “All three were energetic people who would do almost anything to make a buck; all three possessed a certain ruthlessness; all three had a free and easy way about the truth,” Blair wrote.

Of the president’s adult children, Donald Jr. is perhaps the most like his paternal lineage.

Donald Jr. is different from Ivanka and Eric in that he rebelled against his father. He was 15 in 1993, when his father married Marla Maples in the aftermath of his tabloid-chronicled divorce from Ivana Trump. The oldest child hit back hard against a wrenching, all-too-public trauma. “You don’t love us,” he told his father, according to an oft-cited account in Vanity Fair. “You don’t even love yourself. You just love your money.” But in that same era, Don Jr. defended his father with his fists, punching back at kids who taunted him about the divorce.

Donald Trump in those years was frank about his distance from his children, telling interviewers that he didn’t do things like change diapers or play ball with them. “Statistically, my children have a very bad shot,” he told Playboy in 1990. “Children of successful people are generally very, very troubled, not successful.” More recently, Trump joked that demographically, his kids should have ended up “in rehab.”

But today, he takes evident, abundant pride in the fact that they instead have become essential cogs in the family business. He told me in an interview last year that by bringing them into the enterprise in their teens — as his own father did with him — he turned their relationship around. “I mean, I love my children,” he said, “but I got to know my children much better after they graduated from college, in a sense, because they came to work here.”

Trump Jr. has said he was raised largely by his mother and her Czech parents. After the divorce, he refused to speak to his father for more than a year. But the icy relationship thawed with time. Trump Jr. told The Post’s Dan Zak last year that “it wasn’t a ‘Hey, son, let’s go play catch in the back yard’ kind of father-son relationship. . . . It was: ‘Hey, you’re back from school? Come down to the office.’ ”

Despite the early distance — which included boarding school and, in Don’s case, a couple of years of bartending, camping and partying in the Colorado Rockies — the Trump children developed an abiding loyalty to their father. By the time Trump Jr. joined the family company in 2001, he sounded very much like his dad: brash, confident, a son of a wealthy man who nonetheless came off like a street fighter.

For the Trumps, generation after generation, the family is the business, and the business is the family.

Once the kids accepted the terms of their relationship with their father, he became their booster — and he began to praise them in familiar terms. He loves to quote people he met on the campaign trail who told him how great his children are. He seems especially impressed that even people who said they would never vote for him told him he did something right in bringing them up.

“Children of narcissists are often high achievers because they live in fear that their parent will cut them off for a while if they fail to reflect him,” Golomb said. “It’s a very isolating way of being raised. They know exactly what will upset him, and they behave to protect him. They can’t become autonomous.”

People who study narcissism say such parents often demand unquestioning acceptance and threaten their children with rejection if they seem disobedient. But in some families headed by narcissists, it’s little more than a threat, because the adult children have learned their roles so well. They labor as a matter of course to stay in their parent’s good graces.

This past week, when Trump Jr. went on TV to defend himself and his father, the president hardly needed to mount a vigorous argument on behalf of his oldest. His next son did it for him. Eric Trump tweeted: “This is the EXACT reason they viciously attack our family! They can’t stand that we are extremely close and will ALWAYS support each other.”

We need to evict the whole creepy bunch.

[Ali]

On 7/14/2017 at 8:36 AM, nokidsmom said:

Barron, play very close attention, and take what's happening as lessons in what not to do, the first one being get out from under your Dad's shadow.  He may be your Dad but he's kryptonite.

Tiffany, pay attention to this too. You are still young. You can still get out of your dad's shadow before it is too late.

[fraurosena]

In case anyone was wondering, this LA Times op-ed has the answer.

Why did Don Jr.'s emails surface? Because Robert Mueller is already changing Washington's lying ways

Spoiler

For more than a year, the most senior officials in the Trump administration have adamantly, even scornfully, denied that there was any contact between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. The bombshell report earlier this week of Donald Trump Jr.’s efforts to secure dirt on Hillary Clinton from Russian officials — and his June 9, 2016, meeting with the supposed purveyor of that dirt as well as then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his father’s aide Jared Kushner — has put the lie to those denials.

Why has the truth emerged now? A careful parsing of the events of the last few days points to the importance of the federal criminal investigation overseen by a stalwart special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. His behind-the-scenes work already has changed the rules of the game for the White House and contributed to a more accurate public accounting.

The New York Times, which broke the story, reports that it was Kushner’s legal team that recently discovered the now-infamous email chain in which Trump Jr. was told that a senior Russian government official had documents that “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” to which Trump Jr. quickly replied, “If it’s what you say I love it.”

And here is where Mueller’s investigation has rewritten the rule book for senior White House officials. To receive a security clearance, Kushner had to complete a form — the SF-86 — detailing, under penalty of perjury, every contact he had with foreign government officials in the last seven years. (I dealt with SF-86s as a deputy assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice.)

The Trump Jr. emails have given rise to a circular firing squad in the West Wing that we are told features widespread suspicions of Kushner.

Prosecutions for lying on an SF-86 are rare, but they happen, and Kushner already has one strike against him: He first signed and submitted his SF-86 without listing more than 100 applicable contacts with foreign leaders or officials. His lawyer said the questionnaire was submitted prematurely; it took two tries to fully supplement it. The Trump Jr. emails reportedly surfaced when Kushner was going through his records as part of that process.

In a pre-Mueller world, Kushner might have approached the matter casually and, if anyone asked, pleaded ignorance and a busy schedule. That approach, however, is no longer feasible. In the midst of a wide-ranging criminal investigation, with multiple targets, the threat of a perjury prosecution is the sort of offense zealous and sophisticated federal prosecutors — and there is no doubt that Mueller’s team fits that description — could bring to bear.

All of this would lead a good Washington counsel — and Kushner’s lawyers, Jamie Gorelick initially, and then suddenly on Friday, criminal defense specialist Abbe Lowell, are among the best — to conclude that Kushner needed to “get ahead of the story” and turn over the emails (a development the Times learned from people “familiar with” Kushner’s application, who requested anonymity because the questionnaire is not a public document).

Absent the special counsel investigation and the potential legal jeopardy for Kushner, the email chain very possibly would never have seen the light of day. Indeed, President Trump and Trump Jr. at first decided to provide a dishonest account of the June 2016 meeting, omitting the offer of dirt on the Clinton campaign. It was only after further reporting in the New York Times and finally its plan to publish the actual emails that Trump Jr. fessed up.

The threats represented by the Mueller investigation are having additional consequences within the White House, familiar to veterans of previous scandals. Multiple accounts suggest that the Trump Jr. emails have given rise to a circular firing squad in the West Wing that we are told features widespread suspicions of Kushner. These kinds of effects will only get worse as Mueller’s work advances.

Perhaps no quality has more stunned and frustrated the president’s critics than his brazen willingness to lie. Trump frequently appears to have no independent regard for truth, to see veracity in purely expedient terms: What he can get away with in public debate. More dumbfounding, he and others in the White House do seem to get away with it, ridiculing plainly objective accounts as “fake news.”

But the prospect of genuine legal jeopardy upends the calculation, certainly for Trump’s subordinates, who have future careers to lose, families to raise and, unlike the president, no general insulation from criminal prosecution. It is probable that some powerful people will be going to jail as a result of the Mueller investigation. Among the likeliest candidates are those who don’t realize that the game has changed, and that in the ambit of the special counsel investigation, and the courts of law, a lie is a lie.

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