302s

Jason Leopold of BuzzFeed has begun posting a bunch of documents from the Mueller investigation that he obtained through a FOIA request, starting with some pretty heavily redacted 302s (FBI informal records of agent interviews) of sessions with Paul Manafort's second-in-command, Rick Gates, now in prison for his part in some of Manafort's Ukraine misdeeds (there's also material on Michael Cohen and Stephen Bannon that I haven't worked through yet). But these interviews are about the Trump campaign, and particularly the months around 9 June 2016 and the meeting at Trump Tower, which Gates didn't attend or necessarily even know about—he carefully told the FBI that Trump Jr. never spoke to him about the Veselnitskaya meeting, didn't say he never heard of it (weird detail: when that story broke in June 2017, Manafort asked Gates if he'd been at the meeting—I wonder what he would have asked next).

They don't naturally tell us anything directly about the meeting itself, but they're pretty enlightening, in my view, about its context, in such a way as to add some new clarity to my own reconstruction, and I wanted to blog my way through it right away, before I find out what everybody else is doing with it.

The interviews are structured more or less chronologically, and they start off (interview of 10 April 2018) with the lead-up to the Veselnitskaya meeting, in April and May 2016, when the atmosphere in the Trump campaign was all about emails: "interest in the emails was ratcheting up in the April-May 2016 timeframe because it was likely the emails could help campaign":

But he doesn't say which emails he's talking about, just says "the emails" as if everybody knows, and that's extremely interesting, because we don't: I can think of three different possibilities, and they all raise different issues.

The first and most obvious one is the 30,000-odd personal emails deleted from Hillary Clinton's private server when she turned it over to the State Department in 2014, which were certainly a hot topic in April and May as the public debated whether the FBI could recover them or not, but it's not obvious how the Trump campaign hoped to "obtain" them.

Then there's the "dirt" in the form of "thousands of emails of Clinton", that George Papadopoulos learned about from Professor Mifsud on 25 April, which he certainly did not discuss in email correspondence with Corey Lewandowski and Sam Clovis, but seems to have mentioned to Clovis orally:

When interviewed, Papadopoulos and the Campaign officials who interacted with him told the Office that they could not recall Papadopoulos’s sharing the information that Russia had obtained “dirt” on candidate Clinton in the form of emails or that Russia could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information about Clinton. Papadopoulos stated that he could not clearly recall having told anyone on the Campaign and wavered about whether he accurately remembered an incident in which Clovis had been upset after hearing Papadopoulos tell Clovis that Papadopoulos thought “they have her emails.”495 The Campaign officials who interacted or corresponded with Papadopoulos have similarly stated, with varying degrees of certainty, that he did not tell them.

"Varying degrees of certainty", lol. Clovis and Lewandowski might well have been talking about obtaining those, if they did in fact know about them. Gates, in any event, told the FBI "he never heard about the emails or dirt from George Papadopoulos," and we're not told whether he thought they were the same emails as the deleted Secretary of State emails or something else.

Such as, finally, the emails of the hack of the Democratic National Committee, which was going on at the time, after hackers successfully breached the DNC network on 18 April;  it wasn't publicly known until 14th June, when Ellen Nakashima broke the story in WaPo, but Gates says, "as of May 2016, he (Gates) was not aware of the source of the hack". Here, maybe, he's just misremembering the timing, but it is a fact that exactly a week after the break-in, and three days after the first stolen documents (which included a file of opposition research on Donald Trump) was when Mifsud told Papadopoulos about a Russian-hacked email trove (though they didn't start collecting these emails, in fact, until 25 May, per Mueller I:40).

Anyway, it was in this email-obsessed atmosphere that the proposal for the Veselnitskaya meeting arrived, and Gates was in on that discussion (not in this bundle of 302s though, but an earlier interview in March; Mueller I:115), though he seems not to have understood it very well:

Rick Gates, who was the deputy campaign chairman, stated during interviews with the Office that in the days before June 9, 2016 Trump Jr. announced at a regular morning meeting of senior campaign staff and Trump family members that he had a lead on negative information about the Clinton Foundation.703 Gates believed that Trump Jr. said the information was coming from a group in Kyrgyzstan and that he was introduced to the group by a friend.704 Gates recalled that the meeting was attended by Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Paul Manafort, Hope Hicks, and, joining late, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. According to Gates, Manafort warned the group that the meeting likely would not yield vital information and they should be careful.705 Hicks denied any knowledge of the June 9 meeting before 2017,706 and Kushner did not recall if the planned June 9 meeting came up at all earlier that week.

Kyrgyzstan? Well, the Agalarovs, who arranged the 9 June meeting between their Miss Universe friend Junior and their lawyer Natalya Veselnitskaya, are Azerbaijani by origin, but Putin has given them a peculiar monopoly over the relationship between Russia and Kyrgyzstan, as the "'single supplier' of services to integrate the two countries’ bureaucracies and reinforce the new customs common border, by, for example, building new border posts." Gates, in the April 2018 interviews, clearly doesn't get it, but

Not just to the Clinton Foundation, as he'd suggested earlier, but the Clinton campaign as well.

If the 9 June meeting ended up getting the Trump campaign nowhere (I'll get back to that), it was  only one of the signs of ferment: on 12 June, Julian Assange announced that WikiLeaks would be publishing many more emails which Newsweek and ITV London assumed were from Hillary Clinton's private server, but that's not what Assange was saying: "We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton.... we have emails pending publication, that is correct". It's now clear he was talking about the DNC.

That's DJT who was "interested, but composed" before the Assange announcement but more excited afterwards, while the campaign became "euphoric". And then, as they waited through June and into July, disappointed, while Gates, Manafort, and Hicks worked on campaign plans focusing on the as yet unseen server emails:

and "joy" (however briefly) after the DNC emails came out on 22 July

I'm really interested in these redactions suggesting Gates changed his mind about what information he had

and who Manafort was having Gates call re release of "information"—I guess Roger Stone?

In the end, Trump gets bored with the WikiLeaks material and goes back to fretting about those 30,000 Hillary emails he'd been expecting:

and

"Russia if you're listening" starts to sound like a complaint more than an invitation.

That's behind the snipe hunts of poor Peter Smith and Barbara Ledeen and other quests for the 30,000 "missing" secretary of state emails, which launched in July 2016, when Trump asked Flynn and Flynn went to Ledeen (his writing partner's wife) and Smith, both of whom had been chasing this mirage since December 2015. It may be what Papadopoulos had (unwittingly, the way he does everything) led Trump to expect, and of course it wasn't what had come out with the DNC emails at all.

I still like my theory of the 9 June meeting—that Veselnitskaya's denunciation of Browder's American friends the Ziff brothers, which so bewildered Junior and Kushner, wasn't the only thing in her plastic folder, and that it also may have contained printouts from the DNC emails as Rinat Akhmetshin described them—but only as a theory of private dealing between Manafort and Akhmetshin of which the others weren't aware, in line with Manafort's constant effort to portray himself as having little contact with Russians. Assange's announcement of 12 June and the discovery of the DNC hack on 14 June (showing that the DNC really had been hacked and spreading the word that Russians were responsible for it) were much more important to the campaign officials and Trump himself, as his frustration grew.

I like to think Putin was treating Trump much the way Trump treated Volodymyr Zelensky this year, making him wonder why his weapons weren't showing up, and not even sure who was holding them back, until Ambassador Kislyak told the boys what they needed to do at the convention in Cleveland—and a couple of weeks after they had forced the Ukraine platform change on the party, the DNC emails showed up at the WikiLeaks site.

 A fun detail in the light of what's been happening recently is that Manafort and Kilimnik were the ones who started that fake news hypothesis that Ukrainians (i.e., Manafort's personal enemies in the post-revolutionary Ukrainian governmment) were somehow responsible for the DNC hacking: