Dem Excitement Over Junior's Blunder

I don't mind seeing ANYbody in the Trump cabal landing in the hot seat, and even though I personally think there was indeed collusion to help Trump win the presidency, I don't think there will be any charge of treason for any of them. Although, that charge would be far and away more appropriate for the Trumps than it is for Edward Snowden, who was honestly trying to help his countrymen.

The June 3, 2016, email sent to Donald Trump Jr. could hardly have been more explicit: One of his father’s former Russian business partners had been contacted by a senior Russian government official and was offering to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Hillary Clinton.

  NYT

Before the New York Times or anyone else goes any further into assessing the situation, we need to see that email.  And, lucky for us, Junior once again helps us out.  Here's page 4, which he posted separately "due to space constraints," and is where the meat is:

Junior released his emails, but did he make any "adjustments" to them?  That would be a stupid thing to do, as you have to assume someone will be checking on that.  But then, Junior is a stupid man.

“To everyone, in order to be totally transparent, I am releasing the entire email chain of my emails” about the June 9 meeting, he wrote. “I first wanted to just have a phone call but when that didn’t work out, they said the woman would be in New York and asked if I would meet.”

Does he think a phone call would be less problematic than a meeting?

And why in the world is Twitter now the place to handle serious political and legal issues?

We also now have refutation of Junior's statement that he invited Manafort and Kushner to the meeting without telling them what it was about.  That was a ridiculous claim on its face.  He doesn't seem bothered by the lies he told about this meeting, one after the other, each time he found out The Times knew better.  Reminds me of the Bush administration.

The documents “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” read the email, written by a trusted intermediary, who added, “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Now the question is, is that simply the "intermediary"'s (Goldstone) assessment of Russia's stance regarding Trump, or is that also the Trump team's understanding of Russia's stance? I think that could make a difference. Either way, is it true that Junior agreed to the meeting because he was expecting to get dirt on Clinton from a Russian government representative?

He replied within minutes: “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

So, at least he was hoping it would be what Goldstone said it was. And he sees it as better timed to inflict the most damage to Clinton "later in the summer" when it might be too late for her to recover from it.

Four days later, after a flurry of emails, the intermediary wrote back, proposing a meeting in New York on Thursday with a “Russian government attorney.”

[...]

Donald Trump Jr. agreed, adding that he would most likely bring along “Paul Manafort (campaign boss)” and “my brother-in-law,” Jared Kushner, now one of the president’s closest White House advisers.

[...]

The story has unfolded as The Times has been able to confirm details of the meetings.

So that's how the Times is framing their drip, drip, drip.  I suspect they had all the information from the time they wrote their first story, but I don't mind them dragging it out.  Keeps it a hot item for a longer period of time.  We consumers of media do tend to move on quickly.

[I]n recent days, accounts by some of the central organizers of the meeting, including Donald Trump Jr., have evolved or have been contradicted by the written email records.

At any rate, we also now know what we suspected - that Goldstone was lying in his interview. I bet he's thrilled Junior released the emails.

Mr. Goldstone’s emails contradict statements he made in his interview with The Times on Monday, when he said that he did not know whether the elder Mr. Agalarov had any role in arranging the meeting, and that he had no knowledge of any official Russian government role in the offer to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Mrs. Clinton. Instead, he said that Ms. Veselnitskaya had contacted Emin directly, and that Emin had asked him to reach out to the Trumps as a favor to her.

[...]

Subsequent efforts to reach Mr. Goldstone, who acknowledged in the interview that he had spoken with someone at the Trump Organization over the weekend in anticipation of news media attention, have been unsuccessful.

He is lawyering up, no doubt.

Ms. Veselnitskaya, for her part, said in an statement to The Times sent this past weekend that “nothing at all about the presidential campaign” had been discussed at the Trump Tower meeting, adding that she had “never acted on behalf of the Russian government” and that she had “never discussed any of these matters with any representative of the Russian government.” She has not responded to requests for comment since.

We can't prove that Ms. Veselnitskaya is lying - until Junior, or somebody else with a tit in the wringer (perhaps Kushner or Manafort) cops to what was actually said at the meeting. We know the meeting occurred, and we know what the Trump cabal was expecting to hear (generally speaking), but we don't have irrefutable proof that is in fact what they talked about.

Back in Washington, both the White House and a spokesman for President Trump’s lawyer have taken pains to distance the president from the meeting, saying that he did he not attend it and that he learned about it only recently.

Sure, whatever.

Do what you want...you will anyway.