Reported Emails Show Trump Campaign Officials Pushing For Putin Meeting

Joshua M. Patton
Aug 24, 2017 · 6 min read

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A new report from President Trump’s least-favorite news network reveals that investigators looking into Russian efforts to influence the election and their possible ties to the Trump campaign have uncovered emails from Trump officials seeking a meeting with Vladimir Putin.

The above CNN report identifies current White House deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn as the author of one email, sent in June 2016. This was around the time Donald Trump Jr. took a meeting with a Russian lawyer described as part of the foreign effort to get his father elected president.

Dearborn’s email is described as “brief” and appeared to simply be relaying information from an unknown individual who claimed to have connections to the Russian president.

From CNN:

The person was only identified in the email as being from “WV,” which one source said was a reference to West Virginia. It’s unclear who the individual is, what he or she was seeking, or whether Dearborn even acted on the request. One source said that the individual was believed to have had political connections in West Virginia, but details about the request and who initiated it remain vague.

CNN’s source said that Dearborn seemed “skeptical” of the meeting. If the request was genuine — and not just some donor blustering — it shows that during the summer months of 2016 there was more than one effort to put Trump campaign officials and Russian-connected folks in the same room.

As the former chief-of-staff for then-Senator Jeff Sessions, Dearborn was a key campaign aide and reportedly set-up the April 2016 meeting between Sessions and former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. This meeting at the Mayflower Hotel — Trump was delivering his first “foreign policy” speech — directly led to Sessions recusal from the Russia investigation after he was confirmed as President Trump’s attorney general.

Another campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, sent a number of emails pushing his connections to Russian leadership over a period of months. It’s unclear if any official acted on these suggestions or if they were ignored.

The most interesting figure in this disclosure are not the hapless Russophiles who seemed drawn to the Trump campaign, but rather the person referred to in code as “WV.”

West Virginia’s state economy relies heavily on the energy industry, specifically coal. That’s why then-Democratic candidate governor Jim Justice refused to endorse his party’s nominee for president, because of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s aggressive stance on coal.

Justice, who recently switched to the Republican Party at a big campaign rally held by President Trump (who won the state by more than 40 points), is a billionaire coal CEO, and not the only one in the state.

However, he does have ties to a company with a checkered, but mostly good, relationship with Vladimir Putin.

As Politico reported in September 2016:

[Justice] inherited an array of coal interests from his father, then enlarged them to become one of the biggest private coal mine owners in the East. That growth included the 2009 sale of his Bluestone Coal Corp. to Russia’s OAO Mechel for $568 million. Then the coal slump hit, and last year Justice bought Bluestone back for $5 million, less than 1 percent of his selling price.

The nearly 15-year-old OAO Mechel is one of the largest metals and mining companies in Russia. In 2008, Putin criticized the company, essentially accusing them of tax avoidance and launching a government investigation into their business. This caused a nearly 40 percent drop in their stock prices, and forced the company to indefinitely postpone their share issue, meaning debt was their only option to finance their business.

Once OAO Mechel essentially threw themselves on the mercy of the Russian president, he ordered state banks to purchase their bonds again. Still, the company could never dig itself out of the hole losing nearly $6 billion after being slammed by Putin and then the precipitous drop in price for coal, and they faced bankruptcy in 2015.

This would have been the biggest corporate collapse in post-Soviet Russia, and Putin stepped in to save the company a little more than a year later. He didn’t do it out of loyalty or love for Mechel’s owner, Igor Zyuzin, according to Reuters, but instead to prevent tens of thousands of Russians from losing their jobs and their economy taking a crushing hit.

To be clear, this is not to suggest that Gov. Justice is the “WV” mentioned in the email, but evidence that there were Russian interests in the state. President Trump has ties to Russian oligarchs of his own, but, as noted above, there seems to have been a multi-pronged effort by Russia to exploit any connection they had to anyone related to the Trump campaign.

It’s unclear which committee’s investigation uncovered the emails from Papadopoulos and Dearborn, because all four committees investigating Russia’s election interference and possible ties to the Trump campaign received the same cache of 20,000 campaign emails.

Currently running investigations are:

  • The House Intelligence Committee
  • The Senate Intelligence Committee
  • The House Oversight Committee
  • The Senate Judiciary Committee (Subcomittee on Crime and Terrorism)

For the most part, all eyes are Mueller’s investigation which is following, according to Bloomberg, “the playbook federal prosecutors have used for decades in criminal investigations, from white-collar fraud to mob racketeering.”

This means that they are tracking communications, like these emails, as well as following money trails whenever they are present. When it comes to witnesses, they are trying to “flip” them into giving up their bosses, with the goal of reaching the top dog. In this case, that might be President Donald Trump or it might be someone like Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, or Jared Kushner. It’s also very possible that they find nothing prosecutable, even if there are a number of troubling connections and coincidences.

Short of indictments from the Department of Justice or a recommendation for the impeachment of the president, we’re likely never to know what Mueller’s investigation discovers. The rules governing the special counsel say that his team’s findings will be delivered to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in a confidential report. If Rosenstein decides not to prosecute anyone, the details of the multiple grand juries Mueller has empaneled will stay secret (barring a leak, which would be illegal).

It’s clear that President Trump is bothered by this investigation, and I believe that it’s more than simply because of his pride. Multiple analysts and reporters say the Russia investigation enrages the president because it cheapens his win in 2016, and his ego just won’t allow that to stand. This is likely true, at least before Mueller was appointed.

President Trump now seems especially concerned about Mueller investigating his personal and business finances unrelated to Russia and/or the campaign. The rules governing the special counsel give him permission to investigate any crime he uncovers, though it requires the support of the AG, or in this case the Deputy AG. This is what seems to scare the president most of all, especially because digging into those finances is precisely what Mueller and company are doing.

While Mueller’s investigation may be the “sexiest” one, the Congressional investigations are the ones that are aimed not at prosecutions but rather informing the American public about what happened. Of course, as Rep. Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi-gasm stretched on longer than investigations into Watergate, 9/11, or the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, that’s not always what happens.

As it stands, the public will have to be content with these intermittent leaks to try to discern the truth about the extent of Russia’s interference in the U.S. electoral process and the classic presidential scandal question: what did the president know and when did he know it?

What do you think? Post your thoughts and reactions in the comments below.

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Joshua M. Patton

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