There's the beef!

Drawing by Clay Bennett/Chattanooga Times via Democratic Underground.

This is not my idea—I got it from Paul Campos at LGM—but nobody seems to be picking up on it, including Campos, and it seems to me a bit of proof positive that Donald Trump Jr.'s NOTHINGBURGER meeting of June 9 2016 was, in fact, a very precise part of the sequence that led to the successful efforts of Russian intelligence services to get Big Donald elected president of the United States. From the story lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin told AP about his participation in the meeting (via Vox):

During the meeting, Akhmetshin said Veselnitskaya brought with her a plastic folder with printed-out documents that detailed what she believed was the flow of illicit funds to the Democratic National Committee. Veselnitskaya presented the contents of the documents to the Trump associates and suggested that making the information public could help the Trump campaign, he said.

It's that there are some documents we all have access to that detail the flow of funds to the DNC, illicit or otherwise. They look like this,

and they're what you find if you put "contributions" into the search box at the WikiLeaks DNC emails dump posted July 22 2016.

In other words, what Akhmetshin is saying, wittingly or not, is that the information Natalya Veselnitskaya brought to Trump Tower that day consisted of printouts from the hack of the Democratic National Committee conducted by "Fancy Bear" between January 2015 and May 2016. That's what she and Akhmetshin were offering the Trump campaign in return for help, should Trump become president, in lifting the sanctions imposed on Russian oligarchs by the Magnitsky Act.

These particular emails weren't in point of fact anything the Trump campaign could use, because none of the contributions were illicit, which is why you don't hear much about them. Of course Kushner, Manafort, and Little Donald didn't know that yet. And they could easily have imagined that there might be other emails among the 20,000 that were useful in other ways. Like they could be curated into looking like proof that the DNC was improperly tipping the scales in Hillary Clinton's favor against candidate Bernie Sanders, as the later Podesta emails included the texts of Clinton's very highly paid Goldman Sachs talks, which could be made to look as if she was secretly promising to be their White House puppet, and so on. Something like that.

So this really was the meeting where the whole plan, quid and quo, took shape.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.