The release of e-mails between Donald Trump, Jr., and a British
entertainment
publicist describing their effort to receive anti-Hillary Clinton information from
people identified as members of the Russian government has fundamentally
changed the Russia story. It has also demolished the credibility of
Trump, Jr. The velocity of that change was captured in a pair of e-mails that
I received from a former Trump-campaign official. This morning, I asked
him about revelations in the Times about the meeting between Natalia Veselnitskaya and senior
Trump-campaign officials—Trump, Jr., as well as Paul Manafort and Jared
Kushner—and the source practically yawned. “It is still nothing,” he
responded, echoing the common refrain from most Trump defenders since
Saturday, when details of the meeting first emerged.
After the e-mails were posted, he amended his reaction. “It’s moving too
fast for me to appear intelligent in analysis,” he wrote back. “I know
DJT2 is a good guy and wouldn’t break the law.”
In less than ninety minutes, the sentiment from people sympathetic to
the President’s son had shifted from “nothingburger” to “I hope he
doesn’t go to jail.”
The
e-mails are incriminating. According to the correspondence, a Russian
government official had contacted a former associate of Donald Trump,
who had previously had business dealings in Russia, and offered
anti-Clinton information. “This is obviously very high level and
sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support
for Mr. Trump,” Rob Goldstone, an associate of a Russian pop musician,
Emin Agalarov, who was close to the Trump family, wrote. (Donald Trump
once appeared in one of Agalarov’s music videos, and various
reports on Tuesday noted that Emin and Trump, Jr., have texted as recently as
January.)
I asked Steve Schmidt, who helped run John McCain’s 2008 Presidential
campaign, what he would have done if he had received a similar e-mail.
“Would have either ignored it or called the F.B.I.,” Schmidt told me. I
also asked Charlie Black, who has been involved at the highest levels
with numerous Republican campaigns, and who is also a former business
partner of Manafort, if most campaign professionals would have called
the F.B.I. “Yes,” he said, “but you should not cast Donnie as a campaign
professional. He is not.”
Yet the e-mails show that Trump, Jr., eagerly took the meeting with
Veselnitskaya that Goldstone was offering, and made it clear that
Kushner and Manafort, then the two most important people in the Trump
campaign, would be attending. Earlier this week, Trump, Jr., claimed
that he didn’t even know who the woman was. But Goldstone described her
in his e-mail to Trump, Jr., as a “Russian government attorney.” The
e-mails even note that the woman’s identity would indeed be passed on to
Trump, Jr., so that she could make it through security at Trump Tower,
which at the time was protected by the Secret Service. Did Donald Trump
himself know about the meeting? He has been silent so far on the details
of these latest developments, except to offer a pro-forma statement of
support: “My son is a high-quality person and I applaud his
transparency.” In the e-mails released Tuesday, there is a tantalizing
detail. Goldstone notes, “I can also send this info to your father via
Rhona”—Trump’s longtime assistant Rhona Graff—“but it is ultra sensitive
so wanted to send to you first.”
The revelation about Trump, Jr.,’s eagerness to collude with the
Russians—“if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the
summer,” he wrote to Goldstone—is all the more shocking considering the
outrage that he has expressed over such accusations. On July 24, 2016, a
few weeks after his meeting with Veselnitskaya, when he was asked about
complaints from the Clinton campaign that Russians had hacked Democratic
National Committee servers, stolen information, and dumped it online,
Trump, Jr., was indignant. “It just goes to show you their exact moral
compass,” he
said. “I mean, they’ll say anything to be able to win this. I mean, this is
time and time again, lie after lie. You notice he won’t say, ‘Well, I
say this.’ We hear ‘experts.’ You know, ‘His house cat at home once said
that this is what’s happening with the Russians.’ It’s disgusting. It’s
so phony.”
On July 26th, Donald Trump
mocked the idea that his campaign would seek Russia’s help uncovering Clinton
dirt: “In order to try and deflect the horror and stupidity of the
[WikiLeaks] disaster, the Dems said maybe it is Russia dealing with
Trump. Crazy!” Trump, Jr., in a statement he tweeted today, said that he was
releasing the e-mail chain because he wanted to be transparent. This was
also not true. He released it because he knew that the Times was about
to publish it.
Until now, the Russia story has included three highly suspicious actions
on the part of Trump and his associates. During the campaign, Trump
publicly
welcomed and celebrated Russia’s hacking-and-dumping campaign, and he profited from
the damaging information. Since the election, Trump Administration
officials, including Kushner, Jeff Sessions, and Michael Flynn, have
routinely
concealed meetings that they had with Russian officials. And Trump himself has
repeatedly—as recently as last week, at the G-20 meeting in
Germany—sought to cast doubt on the intelligence community’s assessment
that Russia tried to help elect him.
Despite all of this, the main defense of the White House and
Trump supporters on Capitol Hill and in the media has for months been the lack of
evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. That
defense crumbled on Tuesday. The new e-mails show that Trump, Jr., was
told of the Russian government’s support for Donald Trump and that the
younger Trump, and perhaps Kushner and Manafort as well, were eager to
have the Kremlin’s help. Actively soliciting the aid of a foreign
adversary in a Presidential campaign goes well beyond anything that has
been previously revealed. “We are now beyond obstruction of justice,”
Senator Tim Kaine told CNN, on Tuesday. “This is moving into perjury,
false statements, and even potentially treason.”
Will Republicans care? The earliest voices to react have been those of
familiar Trump critics. “Anytime you’re in a campaign and you get an
offer from a foreign government to help your campaign, the answer is
no,” Senator Lindsey Graham
told reporters. “So, I don’t know what Mr. Trump, Jr.,’s version of the facts
are. Definitely—he has to testify. That e-mail is disturbing.” Graham’s
friend and fellow frequent Trump critic John McCain
noted that “it’s certainly another shoe that’s dropped that needs to be
pursued and looked at.” Susan Collins, a member of the Senate
Intelligence Committee,
said that she wants the committee to interview everyone who was at the
meeting.
On Monday, Trump, Jr.,
hired a criminal-defense attorney. He was wise to do so.