I Was Also At Don Jr.’s Russia Meeting. It Wasn’t That Weird.

NH Rees
NH Rees
Jul 24, 2017 · 4 min read

I’m sure it will be reported in the next couple days anyway or come out in Congressional testimony soon enough, so I might as well get out ahead of the story and be completely transparent. Here’s my confession. I, too, was at the meeting last June between Donald Trump Jr., Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, and several other people. But I can assure you that, contrary to all the speculation, it wasn’t that weird. In the moment, it was actually pretty banal.

We started with an icebreaker. Everyone had to go around and say who they represented, what they hoped to get out of the meeting and what their spirit animal was. That took up a big chunk of the meeting because it takes awhile to get through twelve people, plus Jared Kushner couldn’t think of a spirit animal.

There has been a lot controversy around who was actually at this meeting, so let me clear that up before I continue. It was Don, Natalia, Jared, Paul Manafort, Rob Goldstone, Rinat Akhmentshin, Anatoli Samochornov, Ike Kaveladze, two guys named Sergei only they spelled it differently and their last names were similar so I forget which one was which, and me. Oh, and there was also a guy who introduced himself only as Larry, but he didn’t participate in the rest of the icebreaker. Oh, and Casey Affleck was there too, but he just stood in the corner with a sheet draped over himself. He did participate in the icebreaker, though. He said he represented that feeling of watching everything you love and hold dear disintegrate before your eyes in fast motion, and his spirit animal was a duck. He gave a long, rambling series of platitudes about what he hoped to get out of the meeting.

When it was my turn, I said I was there for the hors d’oeuvres because, when Natalia invited me, her email said they would serve “hors d’oeuvres” before the “main course.” In retrospect, perhaps I should have recognized the scare quotes, but I thought she was just one of those people who use quotation marks unnecessarily. I also assumed she had misspelled “pina colluda.” Everything is so clear in hindsight.

When the meeting finally got started, Don Jr. said he very much looked forward to colluding with Russia and that it had been a big dream of his since he was a kid. He came right out and asked for the dirt on Hillary Clinton. Natallia was kind of evasive and only allowed that one time Clinton had incurred a foreign transaction fee from her bank when visiting Russia as Secretary of State. Then she started talking about how tragic it was that American families can’t adopt Russian children and that if this whole sanctions mess went away, the two countries could have such a better relationship and that she even knew of some Russian parents who would gladly adopt little, orange American children and give them a good family and help them crush their enemies.

As she was speaking, she developed a subtle facial tic that made one of her eyes close and her head turn slightly to the side. I don’t know if Don noticed, but, if he did, he didn’t make fun of her, which really impressed me. Don said he didn’t really care about Russian orphans or really any orphans for that matter. He preferred children whose parents hadn’t died. He said that he was starting to see this meeting as a waste of time.

Just then, Jared got a panicked look on his face and hurried out of the room, saying that he had forgotten to list a peanut allergy on the medical form for one of his kids’ summer camp.

Natalia tried to get things back on track by emphasizing how much Russians and Americans could do for each other if they could only trust each other as a child and an adoptive parent do. She looked at Manafort and her eyes got really big and her head jutted forward and then snapped to the side toward Don. And she kept doing the eye thing. Frankly, I think she was having a seizure.

Don was getting impatient. “Do you have any dirt or not?,” he asked. “Don, just hear her out,” said Manafort. But then Natalia started in on adoption again, and the seizure got worse, and Don just lost it. He got up and snapped, “I don’t have time for this. There are endangered white rhinos I could be shooting right now.” And then he walked out the door. Manafort got up and followed, mouthing the word “Sorry” to Natalia as he left, as in “Sorry you are having a seizure.”

After they left, the rest of the meeting was just Larry trying to get us to invest in a timeshare. That was it. The weirdest thing was that there never were any hors d’oeuvres, even during the timeshare part.