On July 19, 2016, a little more than a month after he met with a
Kremlin-connected lawyer who he thought might help to damage Hillary
Clinton’s Presidential campaign, Donald Trump, Jr., spoke in support of
his father at the Republican National Convention. He had been a visible
part of the campaign for months, appearing on television to complain
about the elder Trump’s critics or, often enough, firing guns with local
politicians—Trump had offered his sons’ record as avid hunters as
evidence that he was eager to loosen gun laws. (Donald, Jr., who was
photographed triumphing over a dead elephant, has decried restrictions
on silencers as a restraint on sportsmen.) There was talk, in some
quarters, that he might be a more serious politician than his
father—whatever that might mean—and a possible future mayor of New York.
And his speech included what passed, at the Convention, for classic
conservative tropes, such as this:

There was a brief contretemps after “The Daily Show” pointed out that
this was similar to a line in an essay by Frank Buckley, published in
The American Conservative, but it turned out that Buckley had also
been a writer on the speech, and so the line, if not something earned,
was a gift—or, rather, a purchase, not a misappropriation. All of those things can
be hard to tell apart in the world of the Trumps—as is the difference
between an unqualified dilettante and a political operative working on
behalf of a Presidential candidate. But one aspect of the line that
Donald, Jr., probably came by on his own was his disdain for “Soviet-era
department stores.” Shopping malls like the one in Moscow owned by Aras
Agalarov, the billionaire who, with his son, a family-subsidized Russian
pop star named Emin, were so much better. Whether or not they benefitted
the customers, the Agalarovs helped to fund the 2013 run of the Miss
Universe pageant, an operation partly owned by Trump, which was held
outside of Moscow—and so, if nothing else, they seem to have benefitted
the Trumps. Emin had been at the pageant; a Politico piece from last
year, looking back at the proceedings, links to a music video that
features him in various T-shirts, alongside several contestants in
bathing suits and sequinned dresses, and Trump, Sr., himself, in business
attire.

“Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very
interesting,” Rob Goldstone, an “entertainment publicist,” as he was
identified by the Times, which broke the story of Donald, Jr.,’s
meeting with the Russian lawyer, wrote in an e-mail to Donald, Jr., on
June 3, 2016. (After the Times said that it had obtained a copy,
Trump, Jr., tweeted out the exchange.) The e-mail continued, “The Crown
prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their
meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official
documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her
dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.”

The Times noted that Russia doesn’t have a “Crown prosecutor”—mostly
because it does not, or does not exactly, have someone who wears a
crown. But Trump, Jr., seems to have had no hesitation about the
presumption of oligarchical access. It seems to have made sense to
everyone involved that a shopping-mall developer should have access to
judicial files—just as it made sense, to the Trumps and their circle,
that a real-estate billionaire should have access to the White House.

More important, from the perspective of the various investigations
currently looking at Russian involvement in the 2016 Presidential
election—which a number of senators have already said they would like to
discuss with Trump, Jr.—is what the Trump team thought the Russians’
interest was. Goldstone’s explanation for why the Agalarovs had been
given the information was direct and, one would have thought, troubling:
“This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part
of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” he wrote.
According to the Times, Trump, Jr., replied, “If it’s what you say I
love it especially later in the summer.”

Later in the summer was the time of the Convention and the nomination,
followed by the debates and the heart of the Presidential race. The
direct result of this outreach from Emin was a meeting with a lawyer,
Natalia Veselnitskaya, whom Goldstone identified in another e-mail as a
“Russian government attorney.” That took place on June 9th, at Trump
Tower; Trump, Jr., was joined by Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband
and now a White House adviser, and Paul Manafort, who was then the Trump
campaign’s manager. Trump, Jr., has said in various statements that the
meeting yielded nothing useful, which he presented as a disappointment.
His father’s representatives have portrayed the whole transaction as
entirely normal. Veselnitskaya, for her part, has said that her real
interest was never the campaign but her clients’ concerns about the
Magnitsky Act, which sanctions alleged Russian human-rights abusers.
When NBC asked her how Trump associates got the impression that she did
have damaging material, she said it was possible that “they wanted it so
badly that they could only hear the thought that they wanted.”

And what if Veselnitskaya had come laden with real dirt, obtained in
some illegal way—like, say, the hacked e-mails from the Democratic
National Committee and from John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman,
that soon emerged? Donald Trump, Jr., might have finally felt that the
clerks in some post-Soviet intelligence shop were working for him, the
customer. Would he have noticed, or cared, how Vladimir Putin, the
proprietor of the emporium, was profiting?