They met with a Russian who met with Glenn Simpson before and after the meeting. Why? She said she wanted to talk about adoption of Russian kids. Donald Jr and Kushner were so impressed by her they left the meeting early. She had nothing to offer. The Russian female lawyer was on the payroll of Fusion GPS. So this is going to stick to Trump? Right....
I think what sticks is the lying, even before we find out if there was/wasn't any conspiratorial activity related to Russia. Below is a summary of the disclosure about the Trump Tower Meeting as stated by Wikipedia. How many lies and mis-rememberings can one team have? That's not even to mention the other issues outside this one meeting, like how a 36-year old Harvard/NYU grad like Jared Kushner can have near perfect recall on his connections/contacts with all countries around the world, but when it comes to Russia and its political satellite countries, he seems to suffer from early-onset dementia.
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On April 6, 2017, Kushner filed a revised security clearance form in which he reported a meeting with Veselnitskaya.
[51] Unlike Kushner, Trump Jr. and Manafort were not required to disclose foreign contacts since they did not subsequently serve in the Trump administration.
[52][2]
On July 8, 2017
The New York Times first reported the meeting with "a Russian lawyer who has connections to the Kremlin", arranged by Trump Jr. and including Kushner and Manafort. The information was attributed to "people familiar with the documents" and confirmed by representatives of Trump Jr. and Kushner.
[2][39] On the same day, Trump Jr. released a statement saying the June 2016 meeting had been a "short introductory meeting" about adoption and "not a campaign issue".
[2]
The next day it was further reported that emails setting up the meeting did not mention Russian adoptions or the
Magnitsky Act; instead, Goldstone had told Trump Jr. the meeting would provide the Trump campaign with negative information about Clinton. Goldstone also wrote this offer was "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump-helped along by Aras and Emin".
[17][4][39] Trump Jr issued another statement in which he acknowledged that he had gone to the meeting expecting information about Hillary Clinton.
[41]
On July 10, 2017, White House spokesperson Sanders said the president had learned of the meeting only "in the last couple of days".
[53]
On July 11, it was reported that the original statement released by Trump Jr. on July 8 had been drafted by presidential advisers aboard Air Force One on the way home from the
G20 summit in Germany, and that it had been approved by President Trump
[54] — an account confirmed in a July 31 report by
The Washington Post.
[55]
Also on July 11, Trump Jr. posted the email chain leading up to the meeting on Twitter; a few minutes later
The New York Times also published it.
[56] In a statement accompanying the posted email, Trump Jr. asserted that he had wanted to just have a phone call but that didn't work out.
[57] In an interview later in the day,
Sean Hannity asked whether he had been given further details of the meeting in any phone calls, and Trump Jr. again asserted that such phone calls had not taken place and it had all been email coordination.
[58] He would later, in a September 7 statement, acknowledge that three such phone calls had in fact taken place before the meeting.
[59] Over the next few days the identity of the attendees was established.
[20]
On July 12, President Trump gave an interview with Reuters where he reiterated that he had only known about the meeting for "a couple of days" and that "many people would have held that meeting".
[60] Trump Jr. gave an interview to Fox News's
Sean Hannity in which he denied having told his father about the meeting.
[46] President Trump praised his son Donald Jr. for his transparency, and claimed that they were victims of a "political witch hunt".
[61][62]
Also on July 12, 2017, in a CNN interview Donald Trump's lawyer Jay Sekulov insisted that the initial misleading statement on the Trump Tower meeting had been written by Donald Trump Jr. in consultation with his lawyer and that it wasn't written by Donald Trump.
[63] In another interview the same day, on ABC, Sekulov said that Donald Trump didn't sign off on the statement and that the president "wasn't involved in that".
[64] These repeated statements would be contradicted several months later by Trump's lawyers when they confirmed that Donald Trump had dictated the statement.
[65]
On July 13,
Corey Lewandowski was interviewed on MSNBC's
Meet the Press. When asked why he was not invited to the meeting, he claimed that he and Trump were at a rally in Florida on the date of the June 9, 2016 meeting. In fact, there was no rally in Florida.
[66]Instead, Trump was at a Trump Victory fundraising lunch at the
Four Seasons Hotel, two blocks from Trump Tower. At 1:02 PM, Trump left the lunch and returned to Trump Tower, "where he remained for the rest of the afternoon". According to emails, the meeting was scheduled for 4:00 PM.
[67]
Although the email chain describes Natalia Veselnitskaya as a "Russian government attorney",
[17] Scott Balber, attorney for the Agalarovs, said in a July 14, 2017 interview that Veselnitskaya has no association with the Russian government.
[68] For his part, Akhmetshin denied having ties to Russian intelligence, and said that the efforts by Veselnitskaya and himself "were not coordinated with the Russian government."
[31] Kremlin spokesman
Dmitry Peskov said the Russian government didn't know Akhmetshin or Veselnitskaya, or anything about the meeting.
[69][70]
On July 16, 2017, in an NBC interview Donald Trump's lawyer Jay Sekulov again said that Donald Trump did not draft the response and was not involved in the drafting of the statement.
[71]
On July 31,
The Washington Post reported that the version released by Trump Jr. on July 8 was actually produced by his father on Air Force One, on the way back to the USA from the Group of 20 summit in Germany. The report said that President Trump had "overruled the consensus" of Trump Jr, Kushner, aides, and lawyers, who favored issuing "transparent" reports "because they believed the complete story would eventually emerge." The
Post reported that Trump personally dictated, worked on, and released a version in Trump Jr's name with claims which "were later shown to be misleading". Some advisors reportedly feared "that the president’s direct involvement leaves him needlessly vulnerable to allegations of a coverup."
[55][72][73]
On August 1, at the next day's White House press briefing,
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders stated that Trump "certainly didn't dictate, but ... he weighed in, offered suggestion, like any father would do".
[74]
On September 7, in a closed-door interview with the Senate Judiciary Committee, Donald Trump Jr. contradicted his prior statements about not having had any phone calls with Agalarov in advance of the meeting,
[57][58] acknowledging for the first time that phone records showed three short phone calls with Agalarov prior to the meeting.
[59]
On October 9, CNN reported that Scott S. Balber, formerly a lawyer for Donald Trump and now Agalarov's lawyer, obtained the memo which Veselnitskaya took to the meeting.
[75] Subsequently,
Foreign Policy published the full memo.
[76] According to the memo, an American firm
Ziff Brothers Investments illegally evaded tens of millions of dollars of Russian taxes and contributed stolen money to election campaign of Mrs. Clinton. This accusation was coordinated by Veselnitskaya in advance with
Yury Chaika and repeated later by Putin
[77]
On December 7, CNN reported on two previously undisclosed follow-up emails from Rob Goldstone discovered by congressional investigators. In one of the emails, dated June 14, 2016, Rob forwarded a news story about Russian hacking of Democrats' emails, describing the news as "eerily weird" in light of what they had discussed in the Trump Tower meeting.
[78] Among the recipients of the email were Trump Jr., Kushner, and Manafort, in spite of the original public statement by Trump Jr. in July 2017 that "there was no follow up" after the meeting
[2] and his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2017 that "Rob, Emin and I never discussed the meeting again".
[78]
On April 27, 2018, in an NBC News Interview, Veselnitskaya stated “I am a lawyer, and I am an informant,” adding that “since 2013, I have been actively communicating with the office of the Russian prosecutor general,”
Yury Chaika. Her admission to being an informant contradicted her November 2017 statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which she said “I have no relationship with Mr. Chaika, his representatives and his institutions other than those related to my professional functions as a lawyer.”
[19]
On May 16, 2018, the Senate Judiciary Committee released emails and text messages between Rob Goldstone, Amin Agalarov, Ike Kaveladze, and Trump attorney Alan S. Futerfas, in which Mr. Futerfas provided a prepared statement for them to make, and said it "would be our preference" if they did not say anything else in response to inquiries about the meeting.
[79][80]
On June 2, 2018, CNN reported that President Trump's lawyers acknowledged for the first time that Donald Trump had dictated the first misleading statement put out about the 2016 meeting with Russians at Trump Tower, directly contradicting several prior statements by his lawyers. The acknowledgement was in a confidential letter the legal team sent to special counsel Robert Mueller in January 2018.
[65]