MORE ON TRUMP JR.'S RUSSIAN MEETING

 CreditWilliam Campbell/Corbis, via Getty Images

Last night, the New York Times reported: “Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email. The email to the younger Mr. Trump was sent by Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid reporter who helped broker the June 2016 meeting. In a statement on Sunday, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he was interested in receiving damaging information about Mrs. Clinton, but gave no indication that he thought the lawyer might have been a Kremlin proxy. Mr. Goldstone’s message, as described to The New York Times by the three people, indicates that the Russian government was the source of the potentially damaging information."

The pop star at the center of the latest Russia controversy

New details from others involved in arranging the meeting point to additional Trump links to Moscow. Our Rosalind S. Helderman, Tom Hamburger and Greg Miller report: “The session was set up at the request of Emin Agalarov, a Russian pop star whose Kremlin-connected family has done business with Trump in the past … Emin Agalarov and his father, Aras Agalarov, a wealthy Moscow real estate developer, helped sponsor the Miss Universe pageant, then owned by Trump, in Russia in 2013. After the pageant, the Agalarovs signed a preliminary deal with Trump to build a tower bearing his name in Moscow, though the deal has been on hold since Trump started his campaign for president. ...

“Goldstone previously told The Washington Post that he set up and attended the meeting so Veselnitskaya could discuss the adoption of Russian children by Americans. In a new statement, Goldstone confirmed what Trump Jr. said Sunday: that he enticed the then-candidate’s son by indicating that (Natalia) Veselnitskaya could provide damaging information about Democrats …

“The involvement of the Agalarovs brings the meeting closer to Trump’s past business interests and to the Kremlin. Trump has spent time with both Emin Agalarov and his father — appearing in a music video for the pop singer that was filmed at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton hotel in 2013. … The Agalarovs are also close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Aras Agalarov’s company has been awarded several large state building contracts, and shortly after the 2013 pageant, Putin awarded the elder Agalarov the ‘Order of Honor of the Russian Federation,’ a prestigious designation.”

-- Trump Jr., 39, has hired criminal defense lawyer Alan Futerfas to represent him in the Russia probes. His past clients have included alleged organized-crime associates. In a statement sent late last night, the New York-based attorney neither confirmed nor denied the Times story about the email on Russia’s intentions. He called the June meeting “much ado about nothing” and said Trump Jr. believed he was being offered information about “alleged wrongdoing” by Clinton in her dealings with Russia. “Don Jr.’s takeaway from this communication was that someone had information potentially helpful to the campaign and it was coming from someone he knew,” he said.

-- Susan Hennessey, the managing editor of Lawfare and a Brookings Fellow, drops a truth bomb. A Harvard Law graduate, she was previously an attorney in the general counsel’s office at the National Security Agency:

-- Eugene Robinson calls the Russia meeting “a legal game-changer”: “From now on, ignore the conventional wisdom about how the Russia scandal is not ‘resonating’ with President Trump’s still-loyal base. The question at this point is what strikes a chord with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III — and what kind of legal jeopardy Trump’s closest associates, including his eldest son and son-in-law, might eventually face. … Is this all too complicated for voters to follow? Would Americans beyond the Beltway rather hear about jobs or health care? Perhaps so. But the questions that should be concentrating the minds of the president’s inner circle are legal, not political — and Mueller’s high-powered team of lawyers is experienced at connecting dots.”

-- “This is a very simple test of the common English understanding of the term ‘collusion,’” New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait writes. “Your campaign is told that Russia wants to help you win the election. If you refuse to take the meeting, or perhaps take it only to angrily tell your interlocutor you want no part … then it isn’t collusion. If you take the meeting on the proposed terms, you are colluding. If somehow the information on offer turned out to have no value … then the meeting was ineffectual collusion. But Donald Trump Jr.’s response clearly indicates that he accepted the meeting in order to collude. The most sinister versions of the collusion scenario have been treated as unlikely or paranoid hypotheses. But it is the explanation most consistent with distinct sleaziness that defines Trump … To imagine that [he] might have had the chance to benefit politically from Russian espionage, and turned it down out of a sense of responsibility, is the unlikeliest scenario of all.”

[here's the bar for collusion (which is actually a political, not legal, term): You can't accept any gift from a foreign government, and you can't knowingly conspire with a foreign government to undermine the election. If you do, you could be convicted of conspiracy to work with a foreign adversary or election fraud.]

• Politico: “Trump Jr. in legal danger for Russia meeting…”
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• Vox: “Donald Trump Jr. may well have committed a federal crime, experts say.”
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• Daily Beast: “Lawyers: Donald Trump Jr. Is Getting Terrible Legal Advice. Career prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys are aghast at the behavior of the president’s eldest son — who appears determined to make matters worse.”

Warner calls news of Trump son's meeting with Russia lawyer 'remarkable'

-- Don Jr. must also contend with the ongoing congressional investigations. A Republican senator on the Intelligence committee, Susan Collins of Maine, said the panel “needs to interview” the president’s namesake and the others who attended the meeting. Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), the vice chairman of the committee, gaggled outside his office yesterday afternoon to explain the significance of the latest revelation: “This is the first time the public has seen clear evidence that senior-level officials of the Trump campaign met with potentially an agent of a foreign government to try to obtain information that would discredit Hillary Clinton,” he said.

Huckabee Sanders plays down Trump son's meeting with Russian lawyer

-- What did the president know and when did he know it? Administration officials, who spent months vehemently and categorically denying that there was any contact between the campaign and Russians, are now trying to downplay the significance of an encounter that undercuts many of their previous claims.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed during her off-camera briefing that the president only learned of his son’s meeting with Veselnitskaya “in the last couple of days.” Don Jr. also said in his Sunday statement that his father “knew nothing of the meeting or these events.”

This is very hard to believe. Don Jr. pulled in his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, and campaign chairman Paul Manafort. “This was three people who were closer to him and to the campaign than just about anybody else,” Aaron Blake explains. “This meeting was seen as significant enough for all three of them to make a point to attend, and yet nobody shared details of the meeting with the guy whose campaign they were acting as members of? The president is going to have to address this.”

Why has the White House failed to get its story straight on so many occasions? “When you are treading water in situations like these, the best strategy is generally to get all the bad news out at once, and to understand the truth so that you don't keep getting caught in falsehoods that make it look like you have something to hide,” Aaron writes. “There are basically two options for the White House officials here: They are trying to hide something, or they are completely derelict in dealing with — and getting out in front of — all of this.”

-- John Wagner and Ros Helderman quickly turned a good profile of Don Jr.: “As an executive in his father’s company, Trump Jr. was active in pursuing Trump Organization business prospects in Russia. He traveled to Moscow along with Ivanka Trump in 2006 and also helped pitch Trump-branded real estate to Russians. ‘Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,’ Trump Jr. told a real estate conference in 2008, according to a trade publication. ‘We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.’  In the speech, he said he had traveled to Russia half a dozen times in the previous 18 months. In October 2016, just weeks before his father’s election, Trump Jr. delivered a paid speech in Paris to a group whose leaders are close to Russia.”

Nominee for FBI Director Christopher Wray.     Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

 The Post’s Editorial Board says the latest news further raises the stakes for FBI nominee Chris Wray’s confirmation hearing tomorrow: “The latest revelations only intensify the questions surrounding Mr. Trump’s firing of FBI Director James B. Comey after Mr. Comey, according to his own testimony, declined to pledge personal loyalty to the president. They also intensify the urgency of a careful Senate vetting of Mr. Trump’s nominee to replace Mr. Comey, Christopher Wray, who will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. Mr. Wray must commit to the independence of the FBI by detailing any conversations he had with Mr. Trump, and in particular whether the president asked him for his loyalty. He must be able to say that he made no such commitment. And he must promise that he will do everything to cooperate with, and nothing to impede, the special counsel’s Russia investigation.”

 Donald Jr. speaks at last summer's Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Brian Snyder/Reuters)

-- More than ever, a Russia sanctions bill that’s floundering in the House is becoming a test of congressional will to stop Trump from continuing to cozy up to Putin. “Popular legislation that would limit President Trump’s ability to lift financial sanctions on Russia is mired in a partisan dispute in the House, with Democrats charging that a recent change would weaken the bill,” Karoun Demirjian and Mike DeBonis report this morning. “The pending legislation, which passed the Senate on a 98-to-2 vote last month, is effectively a congressional check on Trump: any time the president wants to make a change to sanctions policy on Russia, lawmakers would have a chance to block him. House Democrats said they do not trust that House GOP leaders are serious about the effort — and are now worried a recent change to the bill would effectively rob them of their ability to raise objections to Trump’s Russia sanctions moves in the future.”

The state of play: “(Speaker Paul) Ryan has spoken in favor of the Senate sanctions bill but has not specifically pledged to bring it to the House floor intact, deferring instead to the House committees with jurisdiction over the matter. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who is close to the president, has also officially deferred to the committees. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Edward R. Royce (R-Calif.) is in favor of holding a floor vote soon.”

-- How cable commentators are talking about the NYT email news:

-- Three alumni of George W. Bush's presidential campaigns pushed back on the White House's talking point that Don Jr.'s meeting was no big deal:

The State of Play When Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort Met Natalia Veselnitskaya

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.

 BPA via Getty Images

Why deciding to ‘move forward’ with Putin is a big mistake.

Putin has been the major source of problems in the U.S.-Russia relationship, not Washington.

MICHAEL MCFAUL, WASHINGTON POST

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It has been Putin’s actions, not decisions taken by Presidents Barack Obama or George W. Bush, that have contributed directly to the most contentious issues in U.S.-Russia relations today, as well as the tensions between Russia and many of our allies. To pledge to forget about these problems created by Putin lets the Kremlin off the hook without generating any positive outcome for the United States in return. That’s a bad deal for the American people and our allies. In fact, it’s not a deal at all – it’s a perfect gift to Putin.

Most obviously, Putin solely created the contentious “question” (Tillerson’s euphemism, not mine) in our bilateral relations regarding Russian interference in our 2016 presidential elections. Obama did not spark this confrontation; Putin did so single-handedly. To remove this issue from the agenda of U.S.-Russia relations in the name of fostering future cooperation is complete capitulation. Trump and Putin can agree to disagree about policies, but we cannot agree to disagree about facts, especially when those facts concern the violation of American sovereignty.

Similarly, Putin created our current bilateral impasse over Ukraine, not Obama. Putin made the decision to occupy and annex Crimea, and intervened in eastern Ukraine to assist the separatist movement there. Obama, our NATO allies and other world leaders who believe in international law reacted to Putin’s actions, not the other way around. To pretend that the United States and Russia are equal, neutral partners in trying to resolve this crisis today, or equal culprits in creating the conflict in the first place, is simply not true. Trump and his administration cannot just forget this tragic recent history that Putin himself made in the name of better relations with Putin.

In Syria, Putin did not start this horrible conflict, but his actions most certainly contributed to the problem, both inside that broken country and between the United States and Russia. At the beginning of the Arab Spring, Putin could have used his influence to help push out Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, leaving intact parts of the government, not unlike what Obama did regarding longtime American ally Hosni Mubarak in Egypt in 2011. To be sure, those of us hopeful for democracy in the wake of Mubarak’s ouster have been deeply disappointed. But Egyptians are much better off today than Syrians; who knows what carnage might have erupted in Egypt had Obama doubled down in support of Mubarak. But that’s exactly what Putin did with Assad, sparking first a civil war and then an even wider war with foreign terrorist organizations participating on both sides. And when Assad began to lose, after killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, Putin intervened militarily to save his Syrian ally. To forget about this history or, worse yet, to suggest that Russia’s approach to Syria is better than ours — as the Trump administration has now done — ignores Russian participation in these crimes.

For any other American president, Putin’s erosion of democracy within Russia might be another issue of contention in U.S.-Russia relations again created by the Kremlin, not the White House. Trump’s complete indifference to this issue, however, means that he already has removed this agenda item from U.S.-Russia relations.

There may be some marginal grievances from the Obama administration that the Russian government would point to and might say have to be forgotten in the quest to improve relations. Putin might bring up the signing of the Magnitsky Act in 2012 to punish human rights abusers. He might point to Obama’s refusal to cooperate with Russia on missile defense, because he would not agree to put limits on U.S. systems. Or Montenegro’s membership in NATO. Or Obama’s refusal to release Russian criminal Viktor Bout from an American jail. Note, of course, that all these outcomes served U.S. national interests and values. But these Russian grievances are small compared to Putin’s messes. And neither Putin nor his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov pledged in Hamburg to forget about past differences as a step toward cooperation today. Putin is happy to accept our concessions without giving anything in return.

There are some difficult agenda items in U.S.-Russia relations not of Putin’s making, including addressing North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. The two presidents must seek to cooperate in addressing this truly confounding challenge. Moreover, Trump and Putin can work to develop a common agenda based on mutual interests regarding other economic and security issues. But we can do so without wiping the past slate clean and without pretending to forget who caused these previous contentious issues in the first place.

DONALD TRUMP JR. SPOKE TO RUSSIAN LAWYER DURING CAMPAIGN.

(Stephanie Keith/Reuters)

The New York Times reported on the front page of Sunday’s paper that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort sat down with a Russian lawyer who has ties to the Kremlin last June.

 AP Photo
On “ Fox News Sunday,” White House chief of staff ReincePriebus dismissed the meeting as “a big nothing burger” that was about adoption and not at all out of the ordinary. “Talking about issues of foreign policy, issues related to our place in the world (or) issues important to the American people is not unusual,” he told Chris Wallace.

But just a few hours later, the president’s son acknowledged that he had actually agreed to meet with the Russian lawyer because she claimed she could provide potentially damaging information about Hillary Clinton. In a statement, Donald Jr. said he met with her at the request of an acquaintance. “After pleasantries were exchanged,” he said, “the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.” He said that’s when she turned the conversation to adoption of Russian children and the Magnitsky Act, an American law that blacklists suspected Russian human rights abusers. “It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting,” he said.

Natalia Veselnitskaya
The New York Times’ Jo Becker, Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman reported last night: “It is unclear whether the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, actually produced the promised compromising information … But [the people interviewed] said the expectation was that she would do so. [The meeting] represents the first public indication that at least some in the campaign were willing to accept Russian help.” A spokesman for Donald Trump’s personal lawyer claims the president was unaware of the meeting.

-- Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger scoop who set up the meeting: Donald Jr. said Sunday that he was approached about the meeting by “an acquaintance” he knew from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant. In an interview Sunday, Rob Goldstone, a music publicist who is friendly with Donald Jr., told The Post that he had arranged the meeting at request of a Russian client and had attended it along with Veselnitskaya. 

President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, also attended the meeting last year at Trump Tower.CreditRuth Fremson/The New York Times

-- Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, said he wants to question “everyone that was at that meeting.” “There’s no reason for this Russian government advocate to be meeting with Paul Manafort or with Mr. Kushner or the president’s son if it wasn’t about the campaign and Russia policy,” he said.

-- A former White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush said what happened “borders on treason.” “This was an effort to get opposition research on an opponent in an American political campaign from the Russians,” Richard Painter said on MSNBC. “We do not get our opposition research from spies, we do not collaborate with Russian spies.” Painter said the Bush administration would not have allowed the meeting to happen. “If this story is true, we’d have one of them if not both of them in custody by now, and we’d be asking them a lot of questions. ... This is unacceptable ...This borders on treason, if it is not itself treason.” 

-- “Trump Jr. confirmed that he went into the meeting expecting to receive information from the Russian lawyer that could hurt Clinton. That is a breathtaking admission,” Callum Borchers writes on The Fix. “The rest of Trump Jr.’s statement is an attempt to minimize the value of what the lawyer actually told him. ...

-- “The Trump Administration should not win any moral or political plaudits even if it turns out, in the end, that there was no collusion between the President’s campaign and the Russian government,” the New Yorker’s David Remnick writes. “Its countless sins of lying, conflict of interest, shady business transactions, character assassination, and so much else assures it a place in history as a uniquely grimy Administration. And we are not yet a half year into its reign ... For now, we live in a moment when the President of the United States is, without shame, trying to intimidate the people whose business it is to come to an honest reckoning. He tries to intimidate the press. He has fired an F.B.I. director and considered going further. It’s reasonable to wonder why.”

Trump vows to ‘move forward in working constructively with Russia’ after Putin denied election hacking

'This is like building an anti-terrorism task force with ISIS': Trump's 'cyber security unit' with Russia is attacked from all sides, as Democrats say 'we might as well mail our ballot boxes to Moscow' 

Donald Trump has revealed US plans to form an 'impenetrable cyber security unit' with Russia, before again blaming Barack Obama for not stopping the Russian interference. Trump fired up his Twitter account on Sunday morning and sent out a series of statements about his meeting with Putin at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, this week. 'I strongly pressed President Putin twice about Russian meddling in our election. He vehemently denied it. I've already given my opinion.....,' he wrote. He then added: 'Putin & I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded.. ... and safe.' The tweets came after it was reported members of Trump's team - including Don Jr and Jared Kushner - met with a Russian lawyer in New York just weeks after he won the Republican nomination in June last year. Trump's plan ...has been roundly criticized by Democrats and Republicans..

U.S. officials say Russian government hackers have penetrated energy and nuclear company business networks.

NY TIMES


WASHINGTON POST

How to handle an unhinged president.

Republicans and conservatives could start by refusing to play down his revolting lunacy.



WASHINGTON POST

Democrats need to convey to a large swath of the country that they understand and respect their lives, their values and their worth.

To win the working class, Democrats need to start talking straight.




WASHINGTON POST

Highlights of the NY Times' annotated Constitution



DAILY KOS

ISIS LOSING IN SYRIA

Goran Tomasevic / Reuters

1. U.S.-backed fighters breached the wall of Raqqa’s Old City in Syria, marking new progress in a weeks-long battle to wrest Islamic State militants from their most important strongholds. (Liz Sly).

Post columnist David Ignatius argues that working with Russia might be the best path to peace in Syria: “The Euphrates marks the informal ‘deconfliction’ line between the Russian-backed Syrian regime west of the river, and the U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led SDF to the east. U.S.-Russian agreement on this buffer zone is a promising sign. It allows, in effect, for the U.S. and its allies to clear the Islamic State’s capital, Raqqa, while Russia and the Syrian regime take the city of Deir al-Zour … The line keeps the combatants focused on the Islamic State, rather than sparring with each other. What Trump and Putin should discuss at the Group of 20 summit is whether this recent agreement on the separation line is a model for wider U.S.-Russian cooperation in Syria. Russian-American cooperation on Syria faces a huge obstacle right now. [And against all the] negatives, there’s only one positive argument: Working with Russia may be the only way to reduce the level of violence in Syria and to create a foundation for a calmer, more decentralized nation that can eventually recover from its tragic war.”

The Daily Beast

Trump has largely continued Obama’s strategy in the fight against ISIS, working to take down top leaders as a means of weakening the entire group. The Daily Beast’s Kimberly Dozier reports: “U.S. special operations forces have removed roughly 50 top ISIS leaders off the battlefield since President Donald Trump took office, down from 80 killed in the last six months of the Obama administration … The lower numbers of high-value targets killed points to the deadly success of the strategy built by the Obama White House … The effectiveness of the current Obama-era strategy of attacking ISIS via local forces together with allies calls into question whether there’s a need for more dramatic revision. That’s presented a dilemma for those working on the Trump anti-ISIS strategy and slowed its public unveiling … The White House has asked defense officials to come up with new ideas to help brand the Trump campaign as different from its predecessor.”

WILL THEY STAY WITH IT? Dems hit on a mantra for the 2018 midterms: “A Better Deal.”

Getty

Democrats have landed on a mantra for the 2018 midterms: “A Better Deal.”

 Politico’s Elena Schor and Heather Caygle report: “The rebranding attempt comes as Democrats acknowledge that simply running against Trump wasn’t a winning strategy in 2016 and probably won’t work in 2018 either. The slogan, which is still being polled in battleground House districts, aims to convince voters that Democrats have more to offer than the GOP and the self-proclaimed deal-maker in the White House. But even as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi prepare a jobs package centered on infrastructure, trade and the minimum wage, some of their most vulnerable members are making other plans. … Leadership may not find universal support for the left-leaning platform, particularly from those trying to defend seats in Trump-friendly states.”