Donald Trump Jr.’s Russian Lawyer Meeting Isn’t Necessarily As Bad As It Looks
On Sunday, the New York Times published what many believe to be the biggest scoop of the Russia scandal (we really need a better name) since the Comey memo. Donald Trump Jr., along with Paul Manafort Jared Kushner, met with Kremlin lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, seeking opposition research on Hillary Clinton, during the 2016 presidential campaign, while Russia was engaging in systematic interference with the American election.
It looks really bad. It looks like this is the evidence of collusion we’ve all been waiting for. But crazily enough, I don’t think this is nearly as bad as we’re all assuming, absent further information that we just don’t have.
The meeting with Veselnitskaya happened on June 9th, just a few days after Trump secured the Republican nomination. And on June 14th, the Washington Post reported, for the first time in 2016, that Russian hackers had penetrated DNC servers. On June 15th, Crowdstrike published its assessment that attributed the DNC server breach to Russia.
In other words, unless Trump, Manafort, and Kushner knew something we didn’t (more on that later), we wouldn’t expect them to have known that Russia was doing anything fishy with regards to the US election or Clinton oppo research when they met with Veselnitskaya. And that matters a lot.
Since as far as we can tell, no hacked emails or anything of the sort were given to campaign operatives, nor was a quid pro quo with the Kremlin set up, the biggest takeaway of the New York Times story is that members of the Trump campaign were willing to work with Russia in order to hurt Clinton. Knowing, as we know now, that Russia was conducting a far-reaching operation in order to interfere in the election to hurt Clinton, that is incredibly sinister. But without knowing that, while I wouldn’t say it’s innocent, talking to a Russian lawyer about Clinton oppo isn’t actually all that awful.
Let’s imagine for a minute a hypothetical: In June of 2016, a lawyer who had lobbied on behalf of the Philippines’ government approaches John Podesta and (I guess) Chelsea Clinton with information alleging bribes paid by the Trump family in the course of building Trump Tower Manilla. How would we react to finding that out? I’m not going to pretend it would be treated as completely benign. But absent an extensive operation from President Duterte’s government to influence the 2016 election against Trump, we would probably not treat that as a country-shaking scandal. It’s just not that far outside of the Karl Rove/David Brock ratfucking playbook.
Actually, ignore that hypothetical. We have a real-life example. During the election, the DNC and Clinton campaign communicated through a longtime Democratic operative named Alexandra Chalupa with the Ukrainian government, who publicized information about Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s ties to ousted former Putin-backed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. According to Politico, the Ukrainian government and Chalupa, acting in this capacity, was responsible for the August 2016 report in the New York Times alleging off-the-books money paid to Manafort by the Yanukovych government, leading to Manafort’s resignation from the Trump campaign days later.
We don’t treat this as a comparable scandal to the potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Part of that is of course that Hillary Clinton isn’t president. But it’s obviously more than that. Ukraine wasn’t engaging in nearly the kind of widespread operation that Russia was. Ukraine didn’t hack into RNC servers, nor was it paying for massive troll armies online. And Ukraine wasn’t attempting to penetrate state parties or voting systems. We don’t treat this as nearly as big a deal, and we shouldn’t.
So what do we make of this story about Veselnitskaya and Donald Trump Jr.? If (and we have no evidence yet suggesting otherwise), he, Kushner, and Manafort knew nothing on June 9th about what we later found out, this incident isn’t so different from the Clinton campaign’s connections with Ukraine. Of course, this is complicated by the fact that Russia, unlike Ukraine, was under heavy sanction and recrimination from the US government. But considering that Trump was already by then calling openly for Russia to be treated far less like a pariah, it’s not so scandalous that they weren’t acting like any Kremlin-connected lawyer was an inherent enemy at the time. Without an attempt to knowingly participate in an espionage operation against the US, this isn’t quite the smoking gun people are looking for.
What, in fact, would that smoking gun be? As I see it, we need three elements in order to treat this collusion investigation as solvent:
- Trump campaign officials
- Knowing that Russia was engaged in illegal activity/espionage
- Sought help from Kremlin actors*
As far as we can tell, this story only features parts 1 and 3. Similarly, last week’s Wall Street Journal scoop, about a Republican operative trying to get in touch with Russian hackers, seems to have parts 2 and 3, but not 1. We need all 3. Until we have them all, these stories are fishy, they’re a little shady, they’re improper behavior, but they’re not Trump campaign officials actively abetting a foreign power’s attack on the US.
So at this point, we’re still looking for one of two more shoes to drop. We have to find either a) evidence that one of these Trump campaign officials (or someone similar) tried again after Russian attribution of the DNC hacks to enlist Russia’s help in attacking Clinton, or b) evidence that these three did know, 5 days before the Post reported it, that Russia was behind hacking of DNC servers.
It’s worth for a minute considering that second possibility. Three days after the meeting with Veselnitskaya, Julian Assange announced that Wikileaks intended to publish emails taken from Hillary Clinton’s server. If there was discussion of intention to do so, or a go-ahead by the Trump campaign officials, that’s the ball game. If Trump officials sought a meeting with Veselnitskaya because they knew hacked emails were coming, that is too.
It’s sometimes really hard to give Trump’s circle the benefit of the doubt. These guys lie, all the time. Trump has done his best to block this investigation every step of the way, calling it fake news and a witch hunt, and of course committing the unprecedented act of pressuring the FBI director to limit the investigation and later firing the FBI director because he didn’t like how the investigation was proceeding. In the course of two days, Donald Trump Jr. gave two completely different explanations of why he met with Veselnitskaya. There is a lot of reason to suspect that there is something even more sinister happening here.
But there is a wide-ranging investigation happening as well. Not only is there Robert Mueller’s task force, as well as the Senate Intelligence Committee (and sometimes even the House as well!), but there are numerous incredibly talented reporters trying to get to the bottom of this. More facts are coming. It’s very possible one or both of the shoes will end up dropping soon. Until they do, let’s not overstate what this meeting with a Kremlin lawyer represents.
*There’s also a hypothetical 4th element — knowledge and/or encouragement from Trump himself. Discovery of that element would double the size of the scandal and make it perhaps the biggest one in US history. There really is zero evidence of that so far though, aside from Trump’s odd comment (joke is an oversimplified term) encouraging Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails.