The State of Play When Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort Met Natalia Veselnitskaya
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PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY THE DAILY BEAST |
Three days after the big, secret meeting, Julian Assange said Clinton-related emails were coming. Two days after that, the DNC said it had been hacked.
MICHAEL TOMASKY, DAILY BEAST
So what was happening last year around June 9, when Donald Trump Jr. met with Natalia Veselnitskaya? Quite a lot, as it turns out....
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[What] made this a crucial period is that this is when the cyber-conspiracy wheels really started turning. Three days after the meeting, on June 12, Julian Assange went on British TV to say for the first time that he had a trove of Clinton-related emails he was going to be releasing (he started doing so in late July, right before the Democratic convention, timed to inflict maximum damage). On June 14, the Democratic National Committee announced that it was hacked. The next day, Guccifer 2.0 took credit for the DNC hack (the cyber-security firm that investigated the breach said it didn’t believe Guccifer’s claims and that it believed Russia was behind the hack).
Were they all coordinating on some level in those early June days? I know how easily such a question can be dismissed as conspiracy-theorizing. And I’m not a conspiracy theorist. At the same time, to use a phrase coined as far as I know by the great Wayne Barrett, there’s also such a thing as a coincidence theorist, to whom everything is just an odd little fluke that can surely be explained away.
It was these people who were saying two or three weeks ago that if this is we’ve got so far on the whole Russia story, let’s just drop it and admit Trump is right and move on. But we have no idea what Robert Mueller and his investigators know. And we now know that high figures in Trumpland were eager to collude. This is far from over.