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":

Paper Music

Updated with moar conspiracy theory

1996 composition Paper II by Josef Anton Riedl.

That question of what documents Natalya Veselnitskaya brought to the Trump Tower meeting of June 9 2016 just got quite a bit tighter in my mind, thanks to a closer reading of the relevant bit of the Mueller Report, describing the lunch Veselnitskaya had before the meeting with Rinat Akhmetshin, Ike Kaveladze, and the translator Anatoly Samochornov. It's likely nobody but Ten Bears is prepared to put up with this yet again, but Bear with me, because I think it changes the perspective quite a bit.

As you'll recall, Akhmetshin told AP in July 2017 that

Veselnitskaya brought with her a plastic folder with printed-out documents that detailed what she believed was the flow of illicit funds to the Democrats...

Printouts that I've speculated could have been from the DNC emails stolen by Russia, which included a host of Finance Contribution Status reports and Donor Vet Committee reports that did indeed detail the flow of money to the DNC during the period from January 2015 through May 2016 (though it was my impression that practically everything in the WikiLeaks publication was from the last two months), and that could have served Manafort (as opposed to the stupid and inexperienced Kushner . and Junior) as proof that the Russians had really managed to hack this stuff.

What Akhmetshin told Mueller's investigators (in an interview on 11/14/17) about the lunch, on the other hand, which I haven't noticed before, focuses this in a remarkable way:

For the Record: My Conversation With Rob Goldstone

Update 5/24/19: Correction—It wasn't in fact Rob I was talking to, I am informed via Twitter by Oui2Entertainment, but the company's co-founder David Wilson; I'm confident at the same time that it doesn't contradict anything Rob would wish to say.

I had no idea I was talking to Rob Goldstone, who used to be the music publicist for the Russian pop singer Emin Agalarov and served as the email intermediary between Emin's father Aras Agalarov and Donald Trump, Jr., arranging the famous Trump Tower meeting of 9 June 2016, until after it was over, and I looked for the first time at the book page screenshots he sent, and it turned out that they were all from Pop Stars, Pageants & Presidents: How an Email Trumped My Life by Rob Goldstone, 2018, from a publisher called Oui2Entertainment.

Probably because it's a completely trivial matter of interest only to people trying to distract attention from their actual crimes, like you when you cheerfully accepted an offer of "official documents" as "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." "I love it!"

— HuffPoTwerp (@Yastreblyansky) May 21, 2019

You're talking about my exact quotation from Rob Goldstone's June 3 2016 email to Junior? https://t.co/1asSUgn8pt pic.twitter.com/EJUkIc2RO4

— HuffPoTwerp (@Yastreblyansky) May 21, 2019

The Crime. IV

Lego Abraham and Isaac, via This Is Dan Scott.

See??

Even Trump knows Junior is going to prison bc of the June 9 meeting and not some lies he told Congress. Don't be stupider than Trump.

Also note: Don is lying abt it going nowhere. https://t.co/miHY9NsGo4

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) August 5, 2018

So right. Today's the day Big Donald has decided to throw his dim son under the bus.

The Crime. II

I think I posted this video by Emin Agalarov before—it's not thrilling musically but OK, and the imagery just keeps getting more extraordinarily interesting.

A few days back I started building up this case that it was possible to know pretty much precisely what crime Donald J.Trump has been covering up with his evasions, lies, and pressure on investigators and witnesses since, at least, those first interviews with personnel like James Comey during the transition in December 2016 (in addition to all the money-laundering and self-dealing he's been doing all along with his Russian mobster pals). It was a pretty restricted thing, I was about to say, a single phone call of three or four minutes with his son Donald Junior on 6 June 2016, sandwiched between two calls between Junior and the Russian pop singer–oligarch Emin Agalarov (what's officially known isn't quite that—what's known is that Junior spoke to somebody with a blocked number between the Russian calls and the president's number happens to be blocked, and Junior says he can't remember whose blocked number he might have been calling, probably not ordering pizza, but he remembers vividly that it wasn't his father).

But I never got around to writing this, and then last night something happened to advance the story beyond what I was expecting: it was announced by persons unknown, apparently not by the president's former lawyer-fixer Michael Cohen, that Cohen was prepared to say something in court about what I'm pretty sure is this very phone call:

So here's the news. Cohen says Trump knew in advance about Trump Tower meeting, was informed by Don Jr., signed off and looked forward to getting the dirt. pic.twitter.com/XI6gcd02Er

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 27, 2018

Josh adds,

A little backstory on this. Cohen has been suggesting that he knows this and is willing to testify to that effect. CNN is apparently the first to get this solid enough to report. I would say it has always pretty clear this was the case. But it being obvious and there being a witness are very different things. This has very big implications.

Fire and fury like the world has never seen

Good times! The "fucking liar", as Ivanka calls him, and the "queen of leaks", as Bannon calls her, photo by Carlos Barria/Reuters via Telegraph.

On today's Guardian story pre-publicizing Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which certainly looks like it's going to be fun, when Stephen Bannon is quoted as saying the Trump Tower meeting between Junior-Jared-Manafort and Natalya Veselnitskaya in June 2016 was "treasonous", "unpatriotic", and "should have called the FBI immediately" and "bad shit"—

Bannon, speaking to author Michael Wolff, warned that the investigation into alleged collusion with the Kremlin will focus on money laundering and predicted: “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.”

—don't think he means that like it was a bad thing or something. He means they did it wrong: they shouldn't have gotten caught, and Bannon should preferably have made some money out of it:

Bannon went on, Wolff writes, to say that if any such meeting had to take place, it should have been set up “in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people”. Any information, he said, could then be “dump[ed] … down to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication”.

And while hating Jared and Ivanka is fun, Bannon still hates them because they're Jewish. That's what "globalist" means ("Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, is quoted as saying: 'It is a war between the Jews and the non-Jews.'"). Enjoy them squabbling and trying to knock each other off as they skitter down the ropes, but they're all bad people.

Update: Veselnitskaya again

International Spy Museum, Washington, D.C.

Boom. There's now some followup email relating to the beloved Trump Tower meeting of June 9 2016, from the famed English music publicist and funny hat fancier Rob Goldstone who arranged the meeting with Donald Jr. on behalf of Emin Agalarov, to Trump's ex-caddy and social media guy Dan Scavino (the one who writes the mostly literate tweets and retweets the impossibly racist ones) and to some Russian friends, obtained by CNN. It's the latter that especially interests me and our own little patch in the public garden, with a reference that means more to us than it does to most investigators:

In one email dated June 14, 2016, Goldstone forwarded a CNN story on Russia's hacking of DNC emails to his client, Russian pop star Emin Agalarov, and Ike Kaveladze, a Russian who attended the meeting along with Trump Jr., Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and Manafort, describing the news as "eerily weird" given what they had discussed at Trump Tower five days earlier.

One of the sources familiar with the content of the email downplayed the interaction, saying news of the DNC hack was surprising because in the run-up to the Trump Tower meeting, the Russian participants had promised information on illicit Russian funding of the DNC. But that dirt was not provided to Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort during the meeting, according to accounts from the participants.

The DNC hacking was not brought up at the meeting, another source said, explaining it would not be 'oddly weird' if the topic had been broached.

Well, excuse me, there's one thing that's completely new here, the idea that "the Russian participants had promised information on illicit Russian funding of the DNC", because I'm pretty sure I've never heard anything like that before. Have you? The most specific thing I remember is the suggestion in Veselnitskaya's memo, prepared for the meeting, that Bill Browder's Hermitage Capital "may also have donated to the DNC", which would be illegal but British, not Russian, and the allegation that the all-American Ziff brothers were Democratic donors (and "It cannot be ruled out that they also financed Hillary Clinton campaign"). And then the folder of printouts described by Rinat Akhmetshin, which sound so much like certain pages from the DNC emails as we know them from WikiLeaks.

But you know what would have been extremely oddly weird? Given that nobody had publicly heard of the DNC hack on June 9, it would have been at least memorable if the subject had been broached, and folks would remember it when the news story came out a few days afterwards.

It would have been spectacularly oddly weird if the topic had been broached in a scenario like the following: If one of the Russians present at the meeting had said that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked and they had the stuff, and the American said, oh, that's ridiculous, we would have heard if something like that happened, get the fuck out of here, and then five count 'em five days later it turned out on CNN that the DNC had indeed been hacked!

Where did that crazy Russian lady leave her folder last week? somebody might have wanted to know. I don't have a clue, Manafort could have said with a quizzical smile. You know what I mean?

More Veselnitskaya

Maat, goddess of truth, via Stillness in the Storm.

Is this story from NBC News on the true side?

Donald Trump Jr. asked a Russian lawyer at the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting whether she had evidence of illegal donations to the Clinton Foundation, the lawyer told the Senate Judiciary Committee in answers to written questions obtained exclusively by NBC News.

The lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, told the committee that she didn't have any such evidence, and that she believes Trump misunderstood the nature of the meeting after receiving emails from a music promoter promising incriminating information on Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump's Democratic opponent.

It's not exactly what she herself told NBC in July 2017. In fact it's totally different—in that story Junior wasn't interested in the Clinton Foundation but the Democratic National Committee:

That other dossier

Via Evi L Blogger Lady.

Remember my theory that the anti-Clinton documents Natalya Veselnitskaya brought to the June 9 2016 Trump Tower meeting were printouts from the stolen DNC emails?

A whole host of developments have come up since then while I wasn't paying attention to suggest I probably got it all wrong; namely, Veselnitskaya came out herself, right at the beginning of the scandal in early July, to explain what she brought to the meeting, and what she said didn't sound like the DNC emails. (It was a "memo" about "a company run by a former US citizen. She believes this company didn’t pay taxes in either Russia or the US and may also have made donations to the DNC,"  she was quoted as saying.) Then again she's also said she couldn't have offered the Trump campaign any incriminating information on Clinton, since she didn't have any ("It is quite possible that maybe they were longing for such an information. They wanted it so badly that they could only hear the thought that they wanted"), and nobody believes that—if only because the correspondence between Rob Goldstone and Donald Jr. made it clear that they thought she did, and Donald Jr. ("I love it!") wouldn't have agreed to meet her otherwise. So perhaps she's not telling the whole truth about the documents as well.

In September, in any case, some details about her document showed up on CNN, through the offices of Scott Balber, who is the attorney for US matters of Aras Agalarov, the real estate developer and sometime Trump business partner whose son Emin originally requested the meeting and also of Irakly "Ike" Kaveladze, the "eighth man" at the meeting. And in early October Foreign Policy obtained exclusive access to the whole thing, a five-page set of notes in English that she hoped to leave with her hosts following her lecture about the injustice of Bill Browder getting the US Congress to pass the Magnitsky Sanctions when he was in fact a bad person whose company Hermitage Capital Investment didn't pay taxes to the US (noted, he gave up US citizenship long ago) or Russia, and neither did Ziff Brothers Investments, a US firm with a big investment in Hermitage, which not only failed to pay taxes to Russia but were also Democratic donors ("It cannot be ruled out that they also financed Hillary Clinton campaign").

Sadly, according to Veselnitskaya's report, the Americans were not interested in these fruits of her legal research: