Burying Junior - Part 8

It is difficult to conceive of a scenario in which a private citizen in Russia has access to derogatory information on a U.S. presidential candidate. The act of offering such information was likely, at minimum, a trial balloon, and at best (from Moscow’s perspective), a chance to pass certain information from an agent of the Russian government to the Trump campaign through the candidate’s campaign manager and son, thereby also implicating Donald J. Trump himself. This begs the most important questions: what did she offer in that meeting? How did Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort respond?

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The key point is that essentially no Russian citizen or lawyer has compromising material on Hillary Clinton which has not been supplied to them from Russian intelligence. The simple assertion that she had such information is tantamount to declaring that Vesilnitskaya was acting as agent of Russian government in this particular role.

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All the alarm bells should have been going off in Trump Tower when they received an email offering to provide “very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and it’s government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

  Just Security

Unless they were already involved with the Russian government and were expecting something like this.

Vesilnitskaya’s advocacy of other causes is irrelevant to her mission on behalf of the Russian government. Based on what we now know, this interaction had all the hallmarks of an overture by Russian intelligence to the campaign, and it is utterly damning that Trump Jr. took the meeting, brought in Manafort and Kushner to the meeting, and none of them reported the events immediately to the FBI nor to U.S. authorities until very recently.

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Let’s make the easy assumption that Trump Jr. informed his father of the highly significant meeting in June. Waiting a few days until after he officially secured the Republican nomination at the Republican convention, candidate Trump then openly invited Russian assistance and election interference. [...] — calling on Russia to find and release Clinton’s emails.

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There is more, of course, that can be said about these connections, and presumably much more information already at the disposal of congressional and FBI investigators.

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Let’s now return to that fateful meeting with the Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in June 2016. After that point, the responsible thing to do on the part of the campaign would have been to report the encounter to U.S. authorities and to steer clear of further Russian contacts. The Trump campaign appears to have done something quite the opposite. Why?

Seems pretty obvious - they were in collusion with the Russians to secure the presidency for tRump.

And what did the Russian intelligence learn from the steps that Trump and his campaign associates took?

That they're dealing with a bunch of idiots?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.