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":
