Donald Trump, Jr. is the dumbest, most stupid, most ignorant traitor in all the history of the world.
And he’s got the email chain to prove it.
Has there ever been the like? The son of the Republican nominee colluded with the Russians to bring down Hillary Clinton and put it all down in black and white — emails preserved forever so that the New York Times, congressional investigators, and the special counsel won’t have to work very hard to indict him for campaign tomfoolery and, if liberals get their way, treason.
Is he really that stupid? And are the Russians really so cruel that they would have approached one of the nominee’s chief campaign advisers directly, with no buffer, no cutout, not even a scapegoat to protect such an important asset? What kind of a black op were the Russians running here?
None of this tracks. Neither does the notion that Putin would have used this cast of characters to make contact with the Trump campaign to help bring Hillary down.
Here’s how the Times describes the Russian principals:
The back story to the June 9 meeting involves an eclectic cast of characters the Trump family knew from its business dealings in Moscow.
The initial email outreach came from Rob Goldstone, a British-born former tabloid reporter and entertainment publicist who first met the future president when the Trump Organization was trying to do business in Russia.
In the June 3 email, Mr. Goldstone told Donald J. Trump Jr. that he was writing on behalf of a mutual friend, one of Russia’s biggest pop music stars, Emin Agalarov. Emin, who professionally uses his first name only, is the son of Aras Agalarov, a real estate tycoon sometimes called the “Donald Trump of Russia.”
The elder Agalarov boasts close ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia: His company has won several large state building contracts, and Mr. Putin awarded him the Order of Honor of the Russian Federation.
“Eclectic”? I suppose. But close enough to Putin’s inner circle that they would be trusted to make contact with a campaign principal and propose he commit treason?
The Washington Post has a thumbnail sketch of the Russians:
Aras Agalarov. Agalarov is the president of the Crocus Group, a Moscow-based real estate development firm that licensed the Miss Universe pageant from the Trump Organization in 2013 to host its pageant in the Russian capital. This is the point at which Agalarov and his son, Emin, became associated with the Trumps.
Agalarov is mentioned on Page 4 in an email from Goldstone as having met with the “Crown prosecutor of Russia” who offered to provide incriminating information about Hillary Clinton.
Note the Times says Agalarov “boasts” of close ties with Putin. In a dictatorship like Russia, it is not unusual for a businessman like Agalarov to exaggerate his closeness to power. It helps him win contracts and make money. How empty is that “boast”?
Consider some of the other Russians:
Natalia Veselnitskaya. A lawyer who has reported links to the Kremlin. It’s not clear whether Veselnitskaya is the “Russian government attorney” who Goldstone suggests will participate in the meeting, but she is the person that attended. (In that NBC interview, she denied having ties to the government.)
Goldstone’s emails suggest that the attorney — presumably Veselnitskaya — flew in from Moscow for the meeting and was scheduled to be in court the same afternoon as the meeting.
What does Goldstone really know? Is it possible he was exaggerating Veselnitskaya’s importance to impress Trump, Jr.? She has never represented the Russian government.
How about the “Crown Prosecutor of Russia,” as Goldstone called him?
Yuri Yakovlevich Chaika. There is no “Crown prosecutor” in Russia, because Russia isn’t a monarchy. (This is perhaps a function of Goldstone’s country of origin.) The Times reports that the reference on Page 4 is to Chaika, Russia’s prosecutor general. Chaika has been in that position since June 2006, when he was first nominated by Russian President Vladimir Putin. (He is in his second term, being renominated by then-President Dmitry Medvedev in 2011.)
The Times says that Chaika is “a Putin appointee who is known to be close to Ms. Veselnitskay.” So what? How many people has Putin appointed while he’s been in power these past decades?
The simple point I’m trying to make is that the Times and other media outlets keep saying that “high level” Russian government officials passed on the info — presumably to Chaika, then to Agalarov, then to Veselnitskaya. None of those people are “high ranking” anything in Russia and it begs the question why Putin or his inner circle would have approached any of these mid-level functionaries in the first place.
I suppose it’s all possible and that Donald Trump, Jr. committed a crime. But it’s also possible that Mr. Goldstone was exaggerating his importance to both sides and made his contacts seem far more important than they were. In that scenario, none of the Russians in the Times article would have had the authority or influence to speak for the Russian government, thus killing the idea that Trump Jr. was colluding with the Putin regime.
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