How the New York Times once tried to overthrow a sitting president and the US government under his administration

[mark francis]

It's hard to believe the Times did this just 8 years ago and was never prosecuted for it. Life is strange when justice is perverted.


Trump Jr. Was Told in Email of Russian Effort to Aid Campaign - The New York Times

Trump Jr. Was Told in Email of Russian Effort to Aid Campaign

Donald Trump Jr. at a rally in Bozeman, Mont., in May.Credit...William Campbell/Corbis, via Getty Images

By Matt ApuzzoJo BeckerAdam Goldman and Maggie Haberman

• July 10, 2017

The Times now has the email to Donald Trump Jr. offering Russian aid to “incriminate Hillary.” His reply: “If it’s what you say I love it.” Read the new article.

WASHINGTON — Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email.

Obama had to sign a waver to allow the Russian lawyer back into the US to meet with Glenn Simpson where they worked out the fake offer of damaging info on Hillary scheme to try to falsely portray Trump as as seeking help from Russia against Hillary.

The email to the younger Mr. Trump was sent by Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid reporter who helped broker the June 2016 meeting. In a statement on Sunday, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he was interested in receiving damaging information about Mrs. Clinton, but gave no indication that he thought the lawyer might have been a Kremlin proxy.

Mr. Goldstone’s message, as described to The New York Times by the three people, indicates that the Russian government was the source of the potentially damaging information. It does not elaborate on the wider effort by Moscow to help the Trump campaign.

Three democrats in on the scheme told the Times that Russia was the one who cooked up the deal, not the Hillary crowd led by Glenn Simpson.

There is no evidence to suggest that the promised damaging information was related to Russian government computer hacking that led to the release of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails. The meeting took place less than a week before it was widely reported that Russian hackers had infiltrated the committee’s servers.

The widely reported story that Russia hacked into the DNC computers and stole hillary's dirty secrets was a lie that was refuted by Robert Mueller, Crowdstrike, and the US Congress investigators.

But the email is likely to be of keen interest to the Justice Department and congressional investigators, who are examining whether any of President Trump’s associates colluded with the Russian government to disrupt last year’s election. American intelligence agencies have determined that the Russian government tried to sway the election in favor of Mr. Trump.

The Times first reported on the existence of the meeting on Saturday, and a fuller picture has emerged in subsequent days.

 

[mark francis]

It's hard to believe the Times did this just 8 years ago and was never prosecuted for it. Life is strange when justice is perverted.

Trump Jr. Was Told in Email of Russian Effort to Aid Campaign - The New York Times

Trump Jr. Was Told in Email of Russian Effort to Aid Campaign

Alan Futerfas, the lawyer for the younger Mr. Trump, said his client had done nothing wrong but pledged to work with investigators if contacted.

“In my view, this is much ado about nothing. During this busy period, Robert Goldstone contacted Don Jr. in an email and suggested that people had information concerning alleged wrongdoing by Democratic Party front-runner, Hillary Clinton, in her dealings with Russia,” he told The Times in an email on Monday. “Don Jr.’s takeaway from this communication was that someone had information potentially helpful to the campaign and it was coming from someone he knew. Don Jr. had no knowledge as to what specific information, if any, would be discussed.”

It is unclear whether Mr. Goldstone had direct knowledge of the origin of the damaging material. One person who was briefed on the emails said it appeared that he was passing along information that had been passed through several others.

Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, and Paul J. Manafort, the campaign chairman at the time, also attended the June 2016 meeting in New York. Representatives for Mr. Kushner referred requests for comments back to an earlier statement, which said he had voluntarily disclosed the meeting to the federal government. He has deferred questions on the content of the meeting to Donald Trump Jr.

A spokesman for Mr. Manafort declined to comment.

But at the White House, the deputy press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was adamant from the briefing room lectern that “the president’s campaign did not collude in any way. Don Jr. did not collude with anybody to influence the election. No one within the Trump campaign colluded in order to influence the election.”

The president, a prolific Twitter user, did not address his son’s controversy on Monday, and instead sought to highlight other issues throughout the morning.

Don Jr. graciously allowed this pretend Russian colluder to attend a meeting that others were attending for unrelated business because of the undiscerning bad recommendation of someone in his circle but when Trump Jr. perceived her attempted deception, he immediately sent her packing back to Hillary Clinton and Glenn Simpson.

 

[mark francis]

It's hard to believe the Times did this just 8 years ago and was never prosecuted for it. Life is strange when justice is perverted.


Trump Jr. Was Told in Email of Russian Effort to Aid Campaign - The New York Times

Trump Jr. Was Told in Email of Russian Effort to Aid Campaign

In a series of tweets, the president’s son insisted he had done what anyone connected to a political campaign would have done — hear out potentially damaging information about an opponent. He maintained that his various statements about the meeting were not in conflict.

“Obviously I’m the first person on a campaign to ever take a meeting to hear info about an opponent... went nowhere but had to listen,” he wrote in one tweet. In another, he added, “No inconsistency in statements, meeting ended up being primarily about adoptions. In response to further Q’s I simply provided more details.”

The younger Mr. Trump, who had a reputation during the campaign for having meetings with a wide range of people eager to speak to him, did not join his father’s administration. He runs the family business, the Trump Organization, with his brother Eric.

This proves Trump Sr. had nothing to do with Trump Jr.s handling of the attempted democrat frame job.

On Monday, after news reports that he had hired a lawyer, he indicated in a tweet that he would be open to speaking to the Senate Intelligence Committee, one of the congressional panels investigating Russian meddling in the election. “Happy to work with the committee to pass on what I know,” the younger Mr. Trump wrote.

Trump Jr. obviously had nothing to hide because the whole scam was a democrat manufactured lie.

Mr. Goldstone represents the Russian pop star Emin Agalarov, whose father was President Trump’s business partner in bringing the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in 2013. In an interview Monday, Mr. Goldstone said he was asked by Mr. Agalarov to set up the meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya.

“He said, ‘I’m told she has information about illegal campaign contributions to the D.N.C.,’” Mr. Goldstone recalled, referring to the Democratic National Committee. He said he then emailed Donald Trump Jr., outlining what the lawyer purported to have.

Glenn Simpson contacted Mr. Goldstone and convinced him to contact Trump Jr. with the fake Russian lawyer offer, which was a complete lie.

But Mr. Goldstone, who wrote the email over a year ago, denied any knowledge of involvement by the Russian government in the matter, saying that never dawned on him. “Never, never ever,” he said. Later, after the email was described to The Times, efforts to reach him for further comment were unsuccessful.

In the interview, he said it was his understanding that Ms. Veselnitskaya was simply a “private citizen” for whom Mr. Agalarov wanted to do a favor. He also said he did not know whether Mr. Agalarov’s father, Aras Agalarov, a Moscow real estate tycoon known to be close to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, was involved. The elder Mr. Agalarov and the younger Mr. Trump worked together to bring a Trump Tower to Moscow, but the project never got off the ground.

Mr. Goldstone also said his recollection of the meeting largely tracked with the account given by the president’s son, as outlined in the Sunday statement Mr. Trump issued in response to a Times article on the June 2016 meeting. Mr. Goldstone said the last time he had communicated with the younger Mr. Trump was to send him a congratulatory text after the November election, but he added that he did speak to the Trump Organization over the past weekend, before giving his account to the news media.

Mr. Goldstone obviously knew nothing about what was really going on with this fake Russian spy and her fake collusion offering.

 

[mark francis]

It's hard to believe the Times did this just 8 years ago and was never prosecuted for it. Life is strange when justice is perverted.


Trump Jr. Was Told in Email of Russian Effort to Aid Campaign - The New York Times

Trump Jr. Was Told in Email of Russian Effort to Aid Campaign

Donald Trump Jr., who initially told The Times that Ms. Veselnitskaya wanted to talk about the resumption of adoption of Russian children by American families, acknowledged in the Sunday statement that one subject of the meeting was possibly compromising information about Mrs. Clinton. His decision to move ahead with such a meeting was unusual for a political campaign, but it was consistent with the haphazard approach the Trump operation, and the White House, have taken in vetting people they deal with ahead of time.

Note that this Times article already stated that this meeting had nothing to do with Trump Sr. because Trump Jr. was not working for Trump Sr.'s campaign, making the statement "unusual for a political campaign" somewhat disingenuous. Trump Jr. was also dishonestly told by someone trying to set up the meeting that the woman wanted to discuss adoption of Russian children. I commend Trump Jr.'s clear compassion for Russian orphans and his willingness to meet with total strangers on orphans' behalf.

Emin Agalarov, right, spoke alongside Donald J. Trump and Erin Brady, Miss USA, in Las Vegas in 2013.Credit...Ethan Miller/Getty Images

But he said that the Russian lawyer produced nothing of consequence, and that the meeting ended after she began talking about the Magnitsky Act — an American law that blacklists Russians suspected of human rights abuses. The 2012 law so enraged Mr. Putin that he halted American adoptions of Russian children.

Mr. Goldstone said Ms. Veselnitskaya offered “just a vague, generic statement about the campaign’s funding and how people, including Russian people, living all over the world donate when they shouldn’t donate” before turning to her anti-Magnitsky Act arguments.

“It was the most inane nonsense I’ve ever heard,” he said. “And I was actually feeling agitated by it. Had I, you know, actually taken up what is a huge amount of their busy time with this nonsense?”

Ms. Veselnitskaya, for her part, denied that the campaign or compromising material about Mrs. Clinton ever came up. She said she had never acted on behalf of the Russian government. A representative for Mr. Putin said on Monday that he did not know Ms. Veselnitskaya, and that he had no knowledge of the June 2016 meeting.

The woman was clearly not speaking for Putin, not speaking for Trump's political enemies, not speaking for Trump's political friends, or for anyone else that matters. Her whole appearance was a sham cooked up by democrats with extremely bad judgments and failed ideas.