Trump Jr. explained that “it was simply a colloquial way of saying that I appreciated Rob’s gesture.” That Trump Jr. expected anyone to believe those words of enthusiasm were not a direct response to the Russian government’s offer to help elect his father and provide incriminating information on Clinton is really quite incredible. In his message to Goldstone, Trump Jr. had remarked that the information would be especially useful “later in the summer,” when he expected the Republican National Convention to nominate Trump as the party’s presidential candidate.11
The questions raised by Trump Jr.’s series of ever-changing accounts are extensive and pressing. Who of sound mind could believe that the Russians were a reliable and objective source on “the fitness, character, or qualifications of a presidential candidate,” especially when the stated purpose of the meeting was to provide intel on Clinton so damning that it might sway the election in candidate Trump’s favor? And by what means other than illegal spying and thievery could the Russians have obtained such previously undisclosed dirt on Clinton?
If the meeting was of so little consequence, why did its participants shroud it in secrecy for so long? Why the rush to consult with lawyers after the fact if nothing about the meeting had a whiff of potential illegality? Why didn’t an email saying that the meeting invitation was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump” set off loud alarm bells for the candidate’s son? Why didn’t Trump Jr. immediately report this evidence of probable foreign meddling in the election to the FBI? Why did Donald J. Trump Sr. say in campaign rallies immediately after the meeting that damaging information on Clinton would be forthcoming? How did Trump Jr. forget about the president’s involvement, just a couple of months earlier, in drafting his critical first statement about the meeting? These lies are potentially relevant to Trump Sr.’s impeachment if Trump Jr. was protecting his father from contemporary knowledge of the June 2016 meeting.
Ask John Sipher and Steve Hall, two former CIA officials who served under Republican and Democratic administrations, and they’ll tell you that the June 9 meeting had all the hallmarks of a recruitment operation by Russian intelligence. Sipher and Hall posited that, once the Russians unearthed derogatory material by hacking into the emails of the Democratic National Committee, they “might then have seen an opportunity for a campaign to influence or disrupt the election.” When Trump Jr. responded with “I love it” to Goldstone’s “fishing” email, “the Russians might well have thought that they had found an inside source, an ally, a potential agent of influence on the election.”
In a standard pattern for Russian intelligence, they “employed a cover story—adoptions—to make it believable to the outside world that there was nothing amiss.” They used “cutouts, nonofficial Russians, for the actual meeting, enabling the Trump team to claim—truthfully—that there were no Russian government employees at the meeting and that it was just former business contacts of the Trump empire.” Thus, “when the Trump associates failed to do the right thing by informing the FBI, the Russians … knew what bait to use and had a plan to reel in the fish once it bit.” Sipher and Hall posit that while a Russian operation to disrupt American society and politics “is certainly plausible, it is not inconsistent with a much darker Russian goal: gaining an insider ally at the highest levels of the United States government.”12
There are yet more new revelations in the never-ending Russia story. In July 2016, when the Russia story first heated up, Donald Trump Sr. flatly declared, “I have nothing to do with Russia—for anything.” He said this despite his business partnerships with Russia-connected interests, his lengthy quest to develop Trump-branded ventures in Russia, and the Trump trademarks in Russia, six of which the Russian government renewed in 2016 at then-candidate Trump’s request. Recently, the press discovered that Trump Sr. sought to complete a real estate deal in Moscow while campaigning for president, even signing a nonbinding letter of consent to pursue it.13
Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, and the ubiquitous Felix Sater were the prime movers of this ultimately failed deal—two of the three men who, according to the New York Times, presented a plan to lift the Ukrainian sanctions on Russia to then–National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. In a November 2015 email to Cohen, Sater bragged about the deal and how his ties to Putin would get Trump elected: “Michael I arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins [sic] private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin. I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected … Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins [sic] team to buy in on this [emphasis added].” It’s entirely possible that Sater was exaggerating his influence in the Kremlin; then again, the New York Times did report that Ivanka had indicated it was possible she’d sat in Mr. Putin’s chair during her Moscow trip in 2006, though she couldn’t recall. The eerie similarity, too, between Sater’s message to Cohen about Russians helping to elect Trump, and the message sent by Goldstone to Trump Jr. suggests that Sater’s claim may not have been the benign “puffery” that Cohen would later purport it to be.14
We have since learned that during this transition period and his White House tenure, Kushner engaged in several other dubious activities that merit investigation. Kushner secretly met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak to explore establishing a back channel between the Trump transition team and the Kremlin using Russian facilities. He met with the head of a Russian state bank that was under U.S. sanctions. He met with the King of Jordon to promote a deal on providing nuclear reactors to Middle Eastern nations that included both American and Russian business interests. Russia’s involvement had apparently diminished over time, but was not necessarily eliminated at the time of the meeting according to news reports. And we first learned through a Politico report on September 24, 2017, that in December 2016 Kushner set up a private email account that he used for some official government business—this after Trump had spent more than a year excoriating Clinton for her use of a private email server, even encouraging chants of “lock her up!” Predictably, Kushner’s lawyer said that these email communications were few and innocuous. According to the New York Times, at least five other close Trump advisers, including Ivanka Trump and former chief strategist Steve Bannon, “occasionally used private email addresses to discuss White House matters.” Again, this is not nearly the complete story. New reporting indicates that Kushner and Ivanka Trump had another private email account that received hundreds of White House emails.15
In July 2016, Manafort, in a series of email exchanges with an intermediary in Ukraine, offered privileged access to the Trump campaign to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, whom I identified in April as a former business partner of Manafort’s and one of Putin’s closest confidants. “If he needs private briefings we can accommodate,” Manafort wrote. Manafort spokesman, Jason Maloni, said that the email exchanges were “innocuous” and involved only an attempt by Manafort to collect on a debt owed to him by Deripaska. But press reports indicate it was Deripaska who believed that Manafort owed him payments from a failed business deal, which Manafort implicitly verified, saying, “How do we use to get whole?”—apparently from his obligations to Deripaska. Reporting by NBC News indicates that Deripaska transmitted some $60 million in loans to companies linked to Manafort. The Trump team has set the Guinness world record for undisclosed but allegedly “innocuous” activities involving a foreign adversary.16
Like the June 9 meeting, this incident involving Manafort and Deripaska had the signs of a “classic intelligence operation being run by the Russians,” said Glenn Carle, who worked for more than twenty years in the Clandestine Services of the CIA. “Approach someone with access and influence, propose benign-seeming justifications, offer an enticement [like forgiving a debt], get benign-seeming favors done by the target in exchange (e.g., a meeting, a briefing, information that seems non-alarming), and use the meeting to entice down the primrose path.”17
Some scholars and journalists have asserted that President Trump could not be charged with treason even if he colluded with the Russians, or charged with misprision of treason if he failed to report collusion, saying that treason can be
