Last week’s news concerning the meeting held by senior staff of Donald Trump’s campaign showed just how blatantly they were willing to seek out opportunities to collude with an adversarial government, and how willing they were to do absolutely anything to gain an edge. The details of the meeting between Donald Trump Jr, Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and a team that included at least four Russians also expanded, again, the universe of connections between Trump and the Kremlin.
Michael Flynn may have gotten in trouble for his direct connections to the Russian ambassador—a connection that seems to shared by numerous members of the Trump team—but among the information gleaned from the story of the meeting with lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, counterintelligence officer turned lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, and at least one other yet to be officially identified, was simply that there are far more paths for information to have flowed between the Trump campaign and the Russian government than the one that goes through the ambassador’s office.
Donald Trump didn’t have to meet directly with Vladimir Putin or Russian officials to collude with the Russian government. Any member of his team could have meet with any one of thousands of cut-outs and go-betweens. In fact, what the events of last week showed was that the most blatant, open efforts at collusion, including emails that directly spelled out Russia’s ongoing efforts to assist Donald Trump, can be utterly invisible until the moment they spill into the public.
As much as the details of the meeting revealed in Trump Trump may have seemed a definitive conclusion to the question of Donald Trump’s colluding with the Russian government, it’s unlikely that the astounding revelations are the end. This was something “they were hungry for” something that excited them, something they “loved.” Something that didn’t happen just once.
Even on this single incident, it’s clear that we’re far from hearing either all the details, or learning all the implications. The simple fact that Donald Trump’s 2020 election fund began covering not just his legal bills, but those of Donald Trump Jr weeks in advance of these revelations shows that the timeline of events being put forward by Trump is simply a lie. The answer to “when did Trump know” seems to be immediately, if not sooner.
Trump’s scheduling of a press conference to provide damaging information on Hillary Clinton immediately after his son received an email promising that the Russian government was going to provide exactly that, goes far beyond any concept of coincidental. If that wasn’t clear enough, Trump made his first email demanding Hillary’s emails within minutes of meeting’s conclusion. The meeting that happened one floor below where Trump was known to be. The meeting that included his campaign chair, his son, and his son-in-law.
It seems that Donald Trump almost certainly knew of the meeting before it occurred. And to believe that he didn’t know of it afterwards—after Veselnitskaya had given Trump Jr a folder containing what appears to be material hacked from the DNC—beggars belief.
If the meeting was, as many have suggested, a Russian test to see how willing the Trump team was to engage in collusion, the answer was very, very willing. Absolutely eager. It also makes it clear that the opportunities for the Trump team to carry out this collusion were much broader than may be generally accepted. It didn’t take a Russian official to walk into Donald Trump’s office and hand over documents that had been sourced by a team of government hackers. It didn’t take a Russian official to send an email offering to continue a program of explicit government support for Donald Trump.
It only made it clear that learning the truth will take an intensive effort to review every meeting, every move, every email.
Because the Trump team will lie every single time.