Today, The New York Times published details of the email chain between Donald Trump Jr. and Rob Goldstone, a publicist, arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer with information that “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.”
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In the email chain, Trump Jr. replies “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer” and says he’d bring Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort to the meeting.
Donald Trump Jr just tweeted evidence that his brother-in-law lied on his SF-86 security clearance form — a federal crime https://t.co/EQWrsIuptq
— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) July 11, 2017
The precise nature of the promised damaging information about Mrs. Clinton is unclear, and there is no evidence to suggest that it was related to Russian-government computer hacking that led to the release of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails. But in 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.
On Monday, Donald Trump Jr. said on Twitter that it was hardly unusual to take information on an opponent. And on Tuesday morning, he tweeted, “Media & Dems are extremely invested in the Russia story. If this nonsense meeting is all they have after a yr, I understand the desperation!”
Rather than comment to the New York Times, the paper says, Trump Jr. late on Tuesday morning released the full emails along with a statement, saying he released them “in order to be totally transparent.”
Trump Jr. repeated his claim that he thought the information was “Political Opposition research” and wanted to have a phone call with the lawyer but it “didn’t work out” so he had a meeting instead. Trump Jr. also repeated the allegation that”she had no information to provide” and “wanted to talk about adoption policy and the Magnitsky Act,” saying the meeting took place “before the current Russian fever was in vogue.”
He also claimed to be “agitated” by the “inane nonsense” that came from the lawyer, as Rob Goldstone told the press on Tuesday.
Trump Jr’s tweets with the emails:
Here's my statement and the full email chain pic.twitter.com/x050r5n5LQ
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 11, 2017
Here is page 4 (which did not post due to space constraints). pic.twitter.com/z1Xi4nr2gq
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 11, 2017
There is no such title as Crown Prosecutor in Russia – the Crown Prosecution Service is a British term – but the equivalent in Russia is the Prosecutor General of Russia.
That office is held by Yury Yakovlevich Chaika, a Putin appointee who is known to be close to Ms. Veselnitskaya.
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And:
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.
“I actually asked him at one point how he knew her, and he said, ‘I can’t remember but, you know, I know thousands of people,’” he said in the interview.
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 media attention, have been unsuccessful.
