Collusion drip, drip, drip

President Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, failed to disclose what lawmakers called a "Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite" involving a banker who has been accused of links to Russian organized crime, three sources familiar with the matter told NBC News.

[...]

An email chain described Aleksander Torshin, a former senator and deputy head of Russia's central bank who is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, as wanting Trump to attend an event on the sidelines of a National Rifle Association convention in Louisville, Kentucky, in May 2016.

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The disclosure is the latest example of a senior Russian official seeking to make high-level contacts with the Trump campaign.

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Kushner rebuffed the request after receiving a lengthy email exchange about it between a West Virginia man and Trump campaign aide Rick Dearborn [now  Trump's deputy Chief of Staff], the sources said.

Kushner responded to the email by telling Dearborn and the handful of other Trump campaign officials on the email that they should not accept requests from people who pretend to have contacts with foreign officials to aggrandize themselves, according Kushner's lawyer, Abbe Lowell.

[...]

However, Torshin was seated with the candidate's son, Donald Trump Jr., during a private dinner on the sidelines of a May 2016 NRA event during the convention in Louisville, according to an account Torshin gave to Bloomberg.

  NBC

So why did he not turn over that information, if the meeting never happened? Furthermore, why was Junior sitting next to Torshin at that dinner? Kushner had supposedly told everyone not to meet with the man. Did Junior decide on his own to buck that advice? Was he maybe intent on gaining Daddy's favor and displacing Kushner as the male heir to Daddy's favors? Or is Kushner lying?

Spanish anti-corruption officials have identified Torshin as a "godfather" in the Russian mafia — something Torshin has denied.

Ah, yes. The Russian mob. No telling who actually sent Junior to that meeting. Could have been Trump himself. The Trump cabal has a problem: who can they send to mob/money laundering/collusion meetings that will be loyal and isn't dumb as a rock?

Rick Clay, a Christian values advocate who sent the email, says that the offer was shot down by Rick Dearborn, the campaign official who initially fielded his request.

  Daily Caller

Wait, what? A "Christian values advocate" is trying to set up a "backdoor overture and dinner meeting"? Jesus. Where does all this begin and end? It's like slowly uncovering the huge part of the iceberg under the water's surface.

In a phone interview with The Daily Caller, Clay said that there was nothing “nefarious” about his outreach to the campaign.

Seriously? Why call the subject "backdoor" if it's not nefarious? Reminds me of Condi Rice testifying that no one could have known about the possibility of an attack on 9/11 when there was a specific presidential briefing headed "Bin Laden determined to strike in US."

Clay, who worked as a contractor in the Iraq War, said that he made the request for Torshin through a Pennsylvania man named Johnny Yenason.

Christ! Yet another person involved. Will there be a jail big enough for everybody?

Yenason and Clay are both affiliated with the Military Warriors Support Foundation, a non-profit group that helps wounded veterans and Gold Star families.

Which is not to say that group was in on sleazy deals to elect Trump, but if it was, how many members were in on it?

Clay says he contacted Dearborn in hopes that Trump would attend a dinner he was hosting in Louisville, Ky. to benefit veterans. Clay said he knew that Trump planned to be in town at the same time for the annual National Rifle Association convention.

A day after Clay sent the email, he said that Dearborn called him to say that the campaign had decided against Trump attending the function.

And this is where Jared's admonition to everyone not to attend comes in.

“Pass on this. A lot of people come claiming to carry messages. Very few we are able to verify. For now I think we decline such meetings,” Kushner wrote in an email released Friday night by his attorney, Abbe Lowell. “Be careful,” Kushner concluded.

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In addition to the Clay email, Kushner failed to provide the committee with emails he was forwarded regarding interactions that Donald Trump Jr. had with WikiLeaks as well as exchanges that a Trump associate had with Sergei Millian, a businessman who is alleged to be a major source for the infamous Trump dossier.

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According to The New York Times, Clay mentioned Torshin, and touted him to Dearborn as a lifetime member of the NRA and gun rights advocate.

Clay, who said that he vaguely remembered mentioning Torshin in his email, also wrote that he hoped to advance “shared Christian values” by having Trump attend the function.

Shared "Christian" values - with Russian gangsters. Is this plot complex enough yet?

Torshin and his assistant, Maria Butina, founded a group called Right to Bear Arms. The non-profit has come under scrutiny amid allegations that it is funded by the Russian government.

Oh, yes, there's another thing about Rick Clay:

Rick Clay, a 54-year-old [former Iraq contractor] from West Virginia, contacted Rick Dearborn, one of Donald Trump’s top campaign aides, last year to pass along a request from a friend seeking to set up a meeting between the campaign and Russia, reported CNN.

Russian intelligence services have courted American conservative and religious groups for years, and Clay told CNN that his friend had met Russians while working together with Christian organizations.

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Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) was aware of Clay’s efforts, according to a GOP source, and helped put him in touch with Dearborn, although the source said the West Virginia Republican had no other involvement in the situation.

  Raw Story

I suppose Senator Capito will need to lawyer up.

Clay said he wasn’t sure if his friend’s request was part of a broader effort by Russia to infiltrate the Trump campaign.

“I mean you never know about that,” said Clay, who was badly injured while working as a contractor in Iraq “I mean how can anybody ever know about that?"

“I think you would be stretching it to say it was an intelligence effort to infiltrate the Trump administration,” he added. “I think you’re stretching that. But you never know.”

Does that not sound like he knew for a fact Dearborn was working with the Russians?

One source familiar with Kushner's testimony before congressional intelligence committees said he specifically denied, under oath, that he was familiar with any attempts by WikiLeaks to contact the campaign. But, according to the source, Kushner was sent an email by Trump Jr. about his conversations on Twitter with WikiLeaks, which were first disclosed by the Atlantic this week. Kushner forwarded an email about the WikiLeaks conversations to communications director Hope Hicks, the source said.

Lied under oath to Congress? Oh yeah, that's no longer a problem since at least James Clapper's lies about secretly spying on American citizens.

"As to the document from Mr. Trump Jr., Mr. Kushner was one of many people to whom one email was sent, and he did not respond," [Kushner's attorney Abbe] Lowell said in the letter.

So, not responding is somehow the same as not knowing of any contact with Wikileaks?

Yeah, these guys are brazen.

Now:

Remember Rob Goldstone who set up and attended that fateful Junior meeting at Trump Tower to receive dirt on Hillary, and who took a powder to nobody knew where? He's coming back to testify to Mueller's team. Jared, Junior, and all the rest must be shitting bricks about now.

Rob Goldstone has been living in Bangkok, Thailand, but has been communicating with Mueller's office through his lawyer, said a source close to Goldstone.

  NBC

Sounds like Mueller already has Goldstone over a barrel.

[S]ources close to Goldstone and familiar with the investigation say they expect he will travel to the United States at some point "in the near future," as one put it.

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Investigators are trying to determine whether the promised assistance from the Russian government was provided, and whether it was part of what a dossier compiled by a former British intelligence officer called "a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation" between the Trump campaign and Russia.

I'd be willing to bet investigators already have determined that the information was provided and are now cementing all their evidence and making deals with participants in the scheme.

Earlier this year, a Russian-American lobbyist and another businessman [Rinat Akhmetshin and Ike Kaveladze] discussed over coffee in Moscow an extraordinary meeting they had attended 12 months earlier: a gathering at Trump Tower with President Donald Trump’s son, his son-in-law and his then-campaign chairman.

The Moscow meeting in June, which has not been previously disclosed, is now under scrutiny by investigators who want to know why the two men met in the first place and whether there was some effort to get their stories straight about the Trump Tower meeting just weeks before it would become public, The Associated Press has learned.

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[One source] said Akhmetshin told congressional investigators that he asked for the Moscow meeting with Kaveladze to argue that they should go public with the details of the Trump Tower meeting before they were caught up in a media maelstrom.

  AP

Akhmetshin's lawyer (who has also represented Trump) Balber denies that was the purpose of the meeting, of course. He says it was about Akhmetshin's concern about reports that he was tied to Russian military intelligence.

Akhmetshin has denied ongoing ties with Russian intelligence, but acknowledged that he served in the Soviet military in the late 1980s as part of a counterintelligence unit.

From all this, I suspect that Jared’s delayed disclosures may hide other, far more damning ones.

  Emptywheel

Yes, and I have to hand it to Mueller's team if they can sort out this rat's nest. Like trying to untangle a fine chain necklace that's gotten tied in knots.

At least part of Robert Mueller’s probe has been informed by [ex-British spook Christopher] Steele’s infamous dossier, which alleges substantive ties between Donald Trump and the Russian government. [...] Steele has stood by his research and, reportedly, has offered up another tip: zero in on the president’s foreign real-estate deals.

  Vanity Fair

Which is pretty much what we've been watching all along. Money laundering and racketeering in Trump's real estate deals with Russian mobsters.

In December of last year, Steele informed Luke Harding, a journalist for the Guardian, that “the contracts for the hotel deals and land deals” between Trump and individuals with the Kremlin ties warrant investigation. “Check their values against the money Trump secured via loans,” the former spy said, according to a conversation detailed in Harding’s new book, Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win. “The difference is what’s important.”

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[I]t’s possible that Trump was indebted to Russian interests when he descended Trump Tower’s golden escalator to declare his candidacy. After the real-estate mogul suffered a series of bankruptcies related to the 2008 financial crisis, traditional banks became reluctant to loan him money—a reality he has acknowledged in past interviews. As a result, the Trump Organization reportedly became increasingly reliant on foreign investors, notably Russian ones. As Donald Trump Jr. famously said in 2008, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

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Bloomberg reported in July that Mueller’s team is investigating a series of deals Trump struck, including the Trump Organization’s failed SoHo development that involved Russian nationals, the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, and the president’s sale of a Palm Beach estate in 2008.

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Russian developer Aras Agalarov, whose son Emin helped broker the controversial Trump Tower meeting last June between Donald Trump Jr. and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, paid $20 million to bring Miss Universe to Moscow. And Russian fertilizer magnate Dmitry Rybolovlev bought the Florida mansion for a staggering sum of $95 million in 2008—despite Trump having paid just $41 million for the property four years prior.

A US president indebted to the Russian mob. That's what we got.

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