Thread: Trump son, son-in-law met with Kremlin-linked lawyer, June 2016

Report: Trump son, son-in-law met with Kremlin-linked lawyer


Associated Press• July 8, 2017

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Donald Trump's eldest son, son-in-law and then-campaign chairman met with a Russian lawyer shortly after Trump won the Republican nomination, in what appears to be the earliest known private meeting between key aides to the president and a Russian.

Representatives of Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner confirmed the June 2016 meeting to The Associated Press after The New York Times reported Saturday on the gathering of the men and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower. Then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort also attended, according to the statement from Donald Trump Jr.

He described it as a "short introductory meeting" during which the three discussed a disbanded program that used to allow U.S. citizens to adopt Russian children. Russia ended the adoptions in response to American sanctions brought against the nation following the 2009 death of an imprisoned lawyer who spoke about a corruption scandal.

Trump Jr. said he invited the other two Americans, was asked to attend by an acquaintance not named in the statement, and was not told beforehand with whom he would meet.

"It was not a campaign issue at that time and there was no follow up," he said.

Kushner lawyer Jamie Gorelick said her client already disclosed the meeting in a revised filing of a form that requires him to list meetings with foreign agents.

"Mr. Kushner has submitted additional updates and included, out of an abundance of caution, this meeting with a Russian person, which he briefly attended at the request of his brother-in-law, Donald Trump Jr. As Mr. Kushner has consistently stated, he is eager to cooperate and share what he knows," she said.

Unlike Kushner, Trump Jr. does not serve in the administration and is not required to disclose his foreign contacts. The newspaper reported Saturday, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, that Manafort disclosed the meeting to congressional investigators questioning his foreign contacts.

Manafort helmed Trump's campaign for about five months until August and resigned from the campaign immediately after the AP reported on his firm's covert Washington lobbying operation on behalf of Ukraine's ruling political party. He is one of several people linked to the Trump campaign who are under scrutiny by a special counsel and congressional committees investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign and potential coordination with Trump associates.

Manafort has denied any coordination with Russia and has said his work in Ukraine was not related to the campaign.

The newspaper said Veselnitskaya is known for her attempts to undercut the sanctions against Russian human rights abusers. The Times also said her clients include state-owned businesses and the son of a senior government official whose company was under investigation in the United States at the time of the meeting.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/report-tr...-politics.html

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This story was already proven to be fake news

Trump's oldest son tells CNN that they met with the lawyer to talk about Russian adoptions

Trump team met with Russian lawyer during campaign

By Kevin Bohn
Updated 1:05 PM ET, Sun July 9, 2017

(CNN) Donald Trump's oldest son has told CNN that he, Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort met with a Russian lawyer last year -- the first known meeting between some of the highest members of the Trump team and a Russian national during the campaign.

The New York Times, which first reported the previously undisclosed meeting, says it occurred at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016 -- two weeks after Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination.

"It was a short introductory meeting," Donald Trump Jr. said in a statement to CNN. "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 that time and there was no follow up."

He added: "I was asked to attend the meeting by an acquaintance, but was not told the name of the person I would be meeting with beforehand."

Trump's representatives did not answer further questions about the meeting.

The Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, founded a group purporting to seek the removal of the Russian adoption ban.

That ban was put in place by the Russian government as retaliation for a US law known as the Magnitsky Act, which allows the US to withhold visas and freeze the assets of Russians thought to have violated human rights. Veselnitskaya has also sought the repeal of the Magnitsky Act.

Kushner disclosed the meeting with the Russian lawyer in revised documentation that he submitted to obtain a security clearance for his White House job as a senior adviser to the President, his lawyer, Jamie Gorelick, said in a statement.

When Kushner initially filed his forms, he did not list any contacts with foreign government officials, Gorelick said. Kushner then submitted supplemental information saying he had "numerous contacts" with foreign officials, she said.

Gorelick said the additional documentation includes the information "that during the campaign and transition, he had over 100 calls or meetings with representatives of more than 20 countries, most of which were during transition. Mr. Kushner has submitted additional updates and included, out of an abundance of caution, this meeting with a Russian person, which he briefly attended at the request of his brother-in-law, Donald Trump Jr. As Mr. Kushner has consistently stated, he is eager to cooperate and share what he knows."

A lawyer for Manafort did not respond to a CNN request for comment about the meeting.

CNN has reached out to Veselnitskaya. She told The New York Times: "Nothing at all was discussed about the presidential campaign." And she added, "I have never acted on behalf of the Russian government and have never discussed any of these matters with any representative of the Russian government."

A spokesman for the President's legal team told CNN the meeting could have been an effort to create an appearance of inappropriate connections between Trump family members and Russia.

"We have learned from both our own investigation and public reports that the participants in the meeting misrepresented who they were and who they worked for," the spokesman, Mark Corallo, said.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/09/politi...ign/index.html

Donald Trump Jr.'s emails reveal discrepancies about Russian lawyer meeting

By MADELINE CONWAY
07/11/2017 01:57 PM EDT

Donald Trump Jr.’s release of an email chain setting up his meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer has created a fresh set of discrepancies about the June 2016 sit-down at Trump Tower.

President Donald Trump’s oldest son has acknowledged that he went to the meeting under the impression that it would yield information “helpful” to his father’s presidential campaign, but he has defended it as seeking standard opposition research.

On Tuesday, ahead of a New York Times report that he had been informed of a Russian government effort to support his father’s campaign in an email setting up the meeting, Trump Jr. posted what he said was the full exchange on Twitter “in order to be totally transparent.”

Those emails raise new questions about some of Trump Jr.’s previous statements on the controversy.

A spokesman for Paul Manafort, who was then the campaign chairman and attended the meeting, declined to comment on Tuesday. Representatives for Jared Kushner, the third campaign adviser in the meeting, and Trump Jr. did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Trump Jr. said he kept Kushner and Manafort in the dark about the subject of the meeting, but he appeared to forward them emails about it beforehand.

As the controversy surrounding the June 2016 meeting has played out, Trump Jr. has sought to minimize the role two other top Trump campaign advisers, Kushner and Manafort, played in arranging it.

On Saturday, Trump Jr. said simply that he “asked Jared and Paul to stop by.” On Sunday, in response to reporting that he had gone to the meeting seeking dirt on Clinton, Trump Jr. further downplayed Kushner and Manafort’s involvement. “I asked Jared and Paul to attend, but told them nothing of the substance,” he said.

But the emails Trump Jr. posted to Twitter on Tuesday seem to contradict that statement. They show Trump Jr. emailing Kushner and Manafort about the meeting under the subject line “FW: Russia - Clinton - private and confidential,” meaning he informed them of at least the general topic beforehand.

It also appeared Trump Jr. may have forwarded the entire email chain, where there were details: The messages explicitly reference “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

It’s not clear from the documents whether either Kushner or Manafort read the email chain. A source close to Manafort said he did not read to the bottom of the email and didn’t know who specifically he would be meeting.


WHITE HOUSE
Trump silent as son walloped in Russia scandal

By NOLAN D. MCCASKILL

Trump Jr. says lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya has no government ties, but one email refers to a ‘Russian government attorney’ coming to meet him

In a statement alongside the email chain he posted to Twitter on Tuesday, Trump Jr. defended his decision to take the June 2016 meeting by noting that “the woman, as she has said publicly, was not a government official.”

Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Kremlin-linked lawyer who met with Trump Jr. last year, denied to NBC News this week that she is tied to Russia’s government, which has also denied knowing her.

But the email exchange published Tuesday suggests that Trump Jr. had reason to think he was meeting with someone working on behalf of the Russian government.

Rob Goldstone, the music industry publicist who reached out to Trump Jr. about setting up the meeting, started their conversation by saying that a Russian official wanted to provide the Trump campaign with incriminating material about Clinton and referenced “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

And when moving to schedule a time to meet, Goldstone said it would be with a “Russian government attorney.”

Trump Jr. said he did not know Veselnitskaya’s name before the meeting, but Goldstone indicated that he would tell him in advance


Trump Jr. lashes out over 'nonsense meeting' with Russian lawyer

By DIAMOND NAGA SIU

Trump Jr. has said he did not know Veselnitskaya’s name until he sat down with her.

“I was asked to have a meeting by an acquaintance I knew from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant with an individual who I was told might have information helpful to the campaign,” he said in a statement on Sunday. “I was not told her name prior to the meeting.”
The emails Trump Jr. posted to Twitter on Tuesday do not reference Veselnitskaya by name, but Goldstone indicated that he would follow up with the names of the people planning to attend the meeting for security purposes.

“I will send the names of the two people meeting with you for security when I have them later today,” Goldstone wrote on June 7, two days before the June 9 meeting.

It is unclear whether Goldstone did follow up with that information; Trump Jr.’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether he did, and Goldstone has not responded to repeated requests.

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/0...meeting-240408

The Clinton News Network and the other rabid left media are on a feeding frenzy.. He talked to a Russian - Big deal. Why aren't they talking about the documented interference on behalf of the Clinton campaign by the Ukraine?

RELATED

Who exactly leaked Trump Jr. emails story to The New York Times?

Steve Bannon Calls Trump Tower Meeting With Russians ‘Treasonous,’ ‘Unpatriotic’

Former strategist says June 2016 meeting was foolish, predicts Trump’s inner circle will be hit with money laundering charges.

By Gabrielle Levy, Political Reporter |Jan. 3, 2018, at 11:15 a.m.




Former presidential adviser Steve Bannon said that the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting in which several of Donald Trump's top campaign officials, including his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., met with a group of Russians was "treasonous" in a new book expected out next week.

Bannon – the executive chairman of Breitbart News who was the chief executive of Trump's presidential campaign and served as the White House chief strategist until August – decried the decision to take the meeting, in which Trump Jr. believed he was to receive damaging information about Hillary Clinton, as foolish and naive.


"The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor – with no lawyers. They didn't have any lawyers," Bannon said, according to journalist Michael Wolff, whose book "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," is due out on Tuesday.

"Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad s–t, and I happen to think it's all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately," Bannon said.

A copy of the book, reportedly based on some 200 interviews with Trump and members of his inner circle, was obtained by The Guardian, which first reported on Bannon's comments Wednesday.


The meeting, which took place on June 9, 2016 at Trump's eponymous Manhattan skyscraper, was attended by Trump Jr., Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort and at least two Russians who have long supported lifting economic sanctions levied against Moscow for human rights abuses. Emails between Trump Jr. and the publicist who helped facilitate the meeting indicate that the campaign believed the Russians would hand over information that would damage Clinton, at the time the presumptive Democratic nominee.

A more experienced campaign, Bannon said, would have kept its distance from the meeting, even as it sought to take advantage of the information available to hurt a rival.

[READ: At Least 6 White House Advisers Used Personal Emails]

The meeting, Bannon said, should have been set up "in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people." Any useful information the campaign received could be "dump[ed] … down to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more-legitimate publication."

"You never see it, you never know it, because you don't need to," Bannon added. "But that's the brain trust that they had."

He also predicted that financial crimes would be the downfall of several members of the president's inner circle as special counsel Robert Mueller is said to be combing through records subpoenaed from Deutsche Bank, the Germany financial services company that has lent extensively to Trump's and Kushner's projects.

Manafort, along with his longtime associate Rick Gates, have both been charged through Mueller's investigation with financial crimes related to alleged money laundering related to their political work in Ukraine. Mueller has also secured guilty pleas from two others – former national security adviser Michael Flynn and campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos – for lying to the FBI; both are said to be cooperating with the investigation.

"They're going to crack Don Jr. like an egg on national TV," Bannon said.

"You realise where this is going – this is all about money laundering," he explained. "Mueller chose [senior prosecutor Andrew] Weissmann first and he is a money-laundering guy. Their path to f–ing Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr. and Jared Kushner … It's as plain as a hair on your face."


"It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner s–t. The Kushner s–t is greasy. They're going to go right through that," he said. "They're going to roll those two guys up and say, 'Play me or trade me.'"

But the White House, according to Bannon, has responded to the investigation with alarming indifference.

"They're sitting on a beach trying to stop a Category Five," he said, likening Mueller's investigation to a hurricane.

https://www.usnews.com/news/national...us-unpatriotic

Donald Trump Furious: Steve Bannon ‘Not Only Lost His Job, He Lost His Mind’

Moved to Other Topics - Off Topic in General Discussion. This article is about politics, not immigration.