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I mean you can’t make this up. Chris Cillizza has a list of the 31 ‘most important, insightful, and just plain odd lines from Don Jr’s Senate Intel Committee testimony’
It seems to me that juxtaposing 1 and 26 next to each other is important, insightful and very odd.
But then here’s 26:
26. “I think the only time I responded to them was, hey, when I am I going to receive the next leak. And they would reach out on a few occasions, sort of passing along news, hey, you may want to tweet this, this would be of interest probably with some sort of admin there.”
Someone needs to ask Jr, his Dad, and friends to use collusion in a sentence. Again, it’s beneficial to recall that technically the FBI investigation is not about collusion but coordination. And if Donald Jr asking Wikileaks to tell him when the next anti Clinton leaks are coming isn’t coordination then I don’t know what is.
Don Jr also doesn’t see getting campaign dirt from the Russian government as collusion either.
3. “In his email to me, Rob suggested that someone had official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary Clinton and her dealings with Russia and that the information would be very useful to the campaign.”
This is another weird or odd argument you’ve been hearing a lot lately-Rudy Giuliani made it on Fox News the other morning- where
A. on the one hand there’s nothing wrong with talking to ANYONE even a hostile foreign power’s intelligence agents about campaign dirt on your opponent
B. but on the other hand there’s nothing to see here anyway as Natalia Veselnitskaya didn’t end up providing useful dirt.
But if A is true you don’t need B and that Don Jr and friends always throw in B suggests they know on some level A is very much open to question. It’s like all the Trumpsters and loyalists who say both that there was no collusion and that collusion is not a crime. Sure but if it’s not a crime then why are then why bother saying there was no collusion?
Giuliani made a common argument of the Trumpsters-that you can obtain campaign dirt on your opponent from anywhere-the source doesn’t matter. While Don Jr has suggested the same thing, here he quibbles in a way that shows he knows it does matter:
24. “It just became pretty obvious to me that they were not representatives of the Russian government.”
It’s not clear to me how this became evident so quickly to Trump Jr. in the June 2016 meeting. But, it informs his belief, I suppose, that he was doing nothing wrong by talking to them about alleged “dirt” on Clinton.”
Again why is it necessary to insist they were not representatives of the Russian government when you have already argued that it doesn’t matter if they were representatives of the Russian government?
Don Jr also says some things that sound suspiciously like lies. It’s pretty hard to believe he and his father never discussed the Russia investigation-Trump complains about it to EVERYONE in his orbit. And Jr’s claim that he never spoke to his father either about the meeting at the time-either before or after-and that he didn’t discuss the response to the story about the meeting breaking in June, 2017 contradicts what we know-that Trump Sr dictated the response to the story himself.
14. “It did not talk about what got them into the door and I didn’t expand on it because I didn’t think it was relevant to discuss what the meeting was not actually about even if that’s what the email was.”
Don Jr.’s first statement in the wake of the revelation of the June 2016 meeting was, in retrospect, decidedly narrow and, by almost any reading, misleading in what it left out.
Here’s that statement: “It was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up.”
The argument he made to the Senate Judiciary Committee was that he didn’t mention why the meeting happened in the first place — to get “dirt” on Clinton — because no dirt was gotten.
15. “I don’t know. I never spoke to my father about it.”
Don Jr. here insists he never spoke directly to his dad about that initial statement about the Trump Tower meeting.
16. “To the best of your knowledge, did the President provide any edits to the statement or other input? “He may have commented through Hope Hicks.”
So. Trump Jr. and Trump didn’t speak or communicate directly about the initial statement. But, Trump Jr. leaves a BIG opening to allow for the idea that his father simply told Hicks the changes he wanted made and then she conveyed those to Trump Jr. and his lawyers.
17. “[Hope Hicks] asked if I wanted to actually speak to him, and I chose not to because I didn’t want to bring him into something that he had nothing to do with.”
Maybe. But also to protect Trump from jeopardy related to being directly involved in dictating a statement about the meeting which, remember, according to Don Jr., he had zero idea about.
But clearly this is all about giving Donald Sr. plausible deniability. The relevant question was wether his father orchestrated the response to to story that broke the news of the meeting. Saying Trump didn’t talk to him he talked to Hicks is little more than quibbling.
UPDATE: There are many many things Jr does not remember. Huffington Post counts 216 things.
One of most amusing, sad, incriminating exchanges in Trump campaign associates’ Senate testimony.
Read this twice:
It’s not collusion because nobody used the words “collusion” or “colluded with Russia” in the meetings.https://t.co/DYmiWVjfsb
via @K8brannen pic.twitter.com/babA2483Ga— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) May 18, 2018
I appreciate that: finally a working definition of ‘collusion’ by the Trumpsters.
“When asked by Senate investigators whether Goldstone actually discussed this proposal during the meeting, as his email suggests, he says no, he brought it up on the way out the door, once the meeting was over. No other participants seem to have witnessed this exchange. Trump Jr. said he did not recall discussing this with Goldstone at the meeting.”
Goldstone was asked by Senate investigators whether he perceived anything as being evidence of “collusion” during the meeting. Goldstone said, “No.” When asked what would constitute “collusion,” Goldstone said he wasn’t sure.
“If I heard the word, dah, dah, dah, colluded with Russia, then I would expect that that was collusion. But I didn’t hear anything like that,” he said.
To which a Senate staffer replied, “So anything short of hearing the words collusion or colluded with Russia would not constitute collusion in your mind?”
“Correct,” Goldstone said.
However, the following week even Goldstone found news of the hack of the DNC ironic:
On June 14, 2016, Goldstone emailed Kaveladze, saying “Top story right now seems eerily weird, based on our Trump meeting last week with the Russian lawyers, etc,” and he included an image of a CNN story whose headline read: “Russian hackers stole Dems’ Trump files, firm says.”
A lot of things seem eerily weird these days.
More recently Goldstone explained that he just made a lucky guess in his email to Donald Jr that turned out to be on the nose-that Vesselntiskaya actually did speak with a top prosecutor for the Russian Federation before the meeting-even if they don’t use the exact phrase ‘Crown Prosecutor’ in Russia. Goldstone just had a really luck guess.