In recent days we’ve seen Kremlin-linked names like Natalia Veselnitskaya, Emin Agalarov, and Rob Goldstone emerging in the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Although Donald Trump, Jr. finds himself at the center of the storm right now, let’s take a harder look at how all of these people seem to know Don Jr. so well.
Here’s a hint:
Is that Donald Jr. seated next to Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya? [Update: the woman in the photo might be Olivia Culpo, Natalia Veselnitskaya, see additional photo below]
Nope.
Is that Donald Jr. seated next to Emin Agalarov, son of billionaire Aras Agalarov, who is a Russian oligarch and good friend of Vladimir Putin?
Nope.
Is that Donald Jr. seated next to Rob Goldstone, the conduit for the meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya?
Nope.
To throw another log on the intrigue fire, consider for one moment that the meeting Don Jr. arranged with Natalia Veselnitskaya also involved the highest people in the Trump campaign—Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort. The meeting took place two weeks after Trump secured the Republican nomination. They spent the day meeting with Reince Preibus and the Republican National Committee for the campaign’s first “finance meeting.” They were jump-starting their Republican National Convention planning. In other words, they were super, super busy. And yet, Don Jr. was able to get Kushner and Manafort to drop everything for the meeting with Veselnitskaya. So perhaps it was someone other than Don Jr. who ordered his top lieutenants to attend?
During the campaign, several interviews with former Trump Organization employees revealed Donald Trump is a notorious micromanager:
Interviews with a dozen people familiar with how Trump conducts business reveal the president-elect as a micromanager who regularly spars over details about decor in projects across his real estate and branding empire.
"I'm very much involved in the details," Trump said during a June deposition in a lawsuit stemming from his development of a Washington hotel. "I was involved in the design of the building and the room sizes and the entrances and the lobby and the marble and the bathrooms and the fixtures and the bars and a lot of things."
Are we to believe that Donald Trump was unaware of a high-level meeting, set-up by his billionaire Russian oligarch friends, with his top inner circle attending, inside Trump Tower, on the same day the Republican National Committee was having an all-day finance session at the same location? Seems implausible.
MSNBC host Joy Reid has a theory about who ordered or blessed the meeting:
It is time to start asking: What did the president know and when did he know it?