was explicitly “informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email.” By accepting the meeting and looping top campaign staff in on it, rather than reporting the solicitation to the FBI, he established the demand side of a secret collusion narrative. On Monday night, the Times reported that Trump Jr. now admits that he agreed to the meeting in the hope that this lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, would have compromising information on Clinton. The insinuation was that she’d left state secrets opposed to hackers, but also that her deleted emails were sitting at the end of a treasure hunt. The supposed vulnerability of Clinton’s private server was a crucial plot element in the right’s email-scandal mythology. The backdrop for this list is that by the time of the June 9 meeting, the thought that hacked Clinton emails might be ripe for the plucking had been in the air for weeks. July 27: In final news conference of his 2016 campaign, Trump asks Russia: “If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing” July 22: WikiLeaks releases stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee July 21: GOP convention concludes with Trump giving his speech accepting the Republican nomination July 18: Washington Post reports, on the first day of the GOP convention, that the Trump campaign changed the Republican platform to ensure that it didn’t call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces June 9: Trump tweets about Clinton’s missing 33,000 emails along with Jared Kushner and former campaign chair Paul Manafort - meets with Kremlin-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. June 7: The 2016 primary season essentially concludes, with both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as the presumptive party nominees “ The risks would be significant, and the benefits hard to discern.”Ĭonsider the following timeline of events surrounding the meeting, as compiled by NBC’s political tipsheet First Read. “ The primary reason I doubt we’re going to see that smoking gun, is that it’s hard to see why it would be in Russia’s interest to loop the Trump campaign in on their interference campaign,” he wrote in May. The most compelling version of this argument, by the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez, includes the additional caveat that the competent half of the Trump-Russia conspiracy would see fewer upsides than downsides in forging an explicit, secret arrangement with the likes of Donald Trump and his assemblage of low-character incompetents. Trump returned the favor with Russia-friendly policy proposals opposed by almost everyone in his party. Russian state media propagandized for Trump and against Clinton every day. Trump asked on live television for Russia to hack Clinton’s emails. A big reason so many observers are reluctant to assume Donald Trump loyalists and Kremlin loyalists ever connived in secret to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign is that so much of what they had to offer one another, they offered out in the open.
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