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As one of the major stories in Russiagate-but there are so many major stories in Russiagate-it has been tremendously enigmatic. A collusion meeting with the Russians after Seinfeld’s own heart: about nothing. 

Indeed, if you examine the Trump Tower Russia testimony all the witnesses claim to a man that the meeting was a big waste of time that served no meaningful purpose and none of them can really explain why they went to all the trouble in going there in the first place.

Neither can anyone really explain whose brilliant idea this allegedly nothingburger of a meeting was. A meeting about nothing, that no one can explain who set up or why they went. It’s not as if none of them had anything better to do-you know Donald Jr, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort were only senior level aides to the Trump Presidential campaign, so clearly they had nothing better to do at 4 PM on June 9, 2016 than waste their time.

One question I had upon reading their testimony from the link above is wether there was coordination of stories-as this narrative of a meeting about nothing sure does sound coordinated. Was it really a meeting about nothing, or is that precisely what Emin and Aras Aglarov’s  lawyer Scott Balber would have us believe?

In yet another Russiagate ‘coincidence’ Balber actually previously represented Donald Trump himself in his frivolous lawsuit against Bill Maher:

“Coincidence? Fmr Trump Lawyer Is Now Representing 8th Person at Junior’s Russia Meeting”

“So it turns out that Scott Balber, the attorney now representing Russians linked to a controversial meeting, used to represent  President Donald Trump in a lawsuit against comedian Bill Maher. Small world.”

“As it turns out, Balber once represented Trump himself in a breach of contract lawsuit against Maher. The comedian had promised he’d give $5 million to a charity if the real estate mogul could prove he actually wasn’t the result of his mother having sex with an orangutan. This legal battle ended when Trump withdrew the complaint.”

“Balber now also represents Emin and Aras Agalarov, two of President Donald Trump‘s friends and business partners, both Russian. Publicist Rob Goldstone, another person who showed up at Trump Jr.’s meeting, has pop star Emin as a client. Kaveladze is a vice president for the Agalarov-owned Crocus Group real estate company, and went to the 2016 meeting as their representative, Balber said. He came there believing he’d be a translator. Not so, since Veselnitskaya brought her own.”

But, of course, coincidences take a lot of planning(Nance’s Law).

Indeed, you wonder if it was Balber who pushed Goldstone to as documented in (Chapter A) claim that he made it all up regarding his email to Donald Jr on June 3, 2016 that Aras Agalarov had met with the Russian ”Crown Prosecutor’ and that  the Russians wanted to offer them dirt on Clinton ‘as part of the Russian government’s support for your father’s campaign.’ Goldstone now insists this was all part of his own colorfully vivid imagination. Did Balbar help him ‘remember’ that?

The trouble with Donald Jr’s explanation is it doesn’t really exonerate him but actually is helpful to prosecutors. His version of events is that. sure, he went to the meeting hoping that they would have incriminating dirt on Clinton-there’s reason to suspect that he and the rest of the Trump campaign had hoped the Russians somehow had Clinton’s deleted emails from her server-as we see in (Chapter B) by then a large part of the Trump campaign-and the supporters-had convinced themselves the Russians actually possessed Clinton’s emails.

Remember Mifusd told Papadopoulos about the incriminating emails the Russians had on Clinton on April, 26 of that year. While the treasonous Coffee Boy-who is lately getting himself into more trouble with all this wild tweets that the ‘real collusion’ is Australia and the British has rather implausibly claimed he didn’t tell anyone in the Trump campaign, he told a  patron at a Chicago bar in March, 2018 that he in fact old Jeff Sessions about it. For Papadopoulos, alcohol is clearly his truth serum. It’s certainly plausible the Trump campaign wrongly thought the emails Misfud referred to were from Clinton’s server.”

FN: Even post the Mueller Report we don’t know for sure what Mifsud was referring to-as he’s disappeared off the face of the earth-in Papadopoulos’ plea  indictment Mueller revealed that the lies the Coffee Boy told him about Mifsud enabled the enigmatic Russian professor to escape-it turns out he was at Washington DC at the time.

But by Jr’s own admission he went to the meeting because of Goldstone’s promise of dirt on Clinton-which he hoped was actually the deleted emails from her server. Instead Vesselntiskaya did a kind of workshop about the Magnitsky Act, Bill Browder and adoptions-while falsely claiming financial ties between the DNC and Browder/Magnistky and the Ziff Brothers. 

I argued above that there is reason to suspect Balber of coordinating the stories of the various Trump Tower Russia participants. Emptywheel counts no less than six attempts to craft the narrative about the collusion meeting-as of when she wrote this, December 14, 2017:

I’ve been tracking the considerable effort one-time Trump lawyer and current Agalarov lawyer Scott Balber has made to craft a legit story for the June 9 Trump Tower meeting. Heretofore, he has done so on five occasions:

1. A meeting between Rinat Akhmetshin and Ike Kaveladze (the latter of whom Balber represents as an employee of Agalarov) in Moscow in June 2017, just as Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort were both belatedly disclosing the meeting to various authorities; this story appears to have been an attempt to pre-empt the damage that would be done when Akhmetshin’s involvement became public
2. A Balber trip sometime before October to Russia to coordinate a story with and get documents from Natalia Veselnitskaya to back her version of the talking points she reportedly shared with Trump’s people
3. Another October story, this “revealing” that Veselnitskaya’s research came from (or actually was shared with) Russian prosecutor Yuri Chaika, but insisting (per Balber) that Agalarov had no ties with the prosecutor
4. Balber filling in a hole in the story for Goldstone: he told the Daily Beast that after his client Ike Kaveladze saw an email (from whom he doesn’t describe) indicating that Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and Don Jr would be at the meeting, he called a close associate of Goldstone’s (and a former employee of Balber’s client), Roman Beniaminov, to find out what the meeting was about. That’s the first he learned — at least as far as he told congressional investigators — that the meeting was about dealing “dirt” on Hillary.
5. Balber insisting that Rob Goldstone’s email calling the news of the DNC hack and leak “eerie” “odd because hacking was never discussed in the meeting and it was not consistent with what was discussed.”

Regarding #s 3 and 4, as noted above, Goldstone is now claiming to have simply ‘made it all up’ about Aras Agalarov’s arranging the Trump Tower meeting with the Russian ‘Crown Prosecutor.’ This reminds you of the explanations of Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi on their predictions in August, 2016 of Podesta’s time in the barrel. They didn’t have any prior knowledge they just made lucky guesses for totally unrelated reasons.

Here we’re supposed to believe that Goldstone totally made up the idea that Aras Agalarov met with the ‘Crown Prosecutor’ and the fact that Vesselnitkaya actually did work with Russia’s top prosecutor on the research for the meeting was just a total coincidence-perhaps we need to consult Nate Silver on the odds that you totally make something up that turns out to be true-just like Corsi claims that when he told Roger Stone the emails would be about Podesta it was just an educated guess.

Lot’s of ‘coincidences.’

“Number Six:

“Balber’s back in this story, revealing that Rob Goldstone (who I believe had meetings with all major investigations in DC this week) offered to set up a meeting between Putin and Trump in July 2015. Balber insists that such a thing couldn’t really happen because his client can’t just set up meetings with Putin.

About a month after Donald Trump launched his presidential bid, a British music promoter suggested his Russian pop-star client could arrange for the new candidate to meet with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, according to an email obtained by The Washington Post.

The July 2015 offer by publicist Rob Goldstone came about a year before he set up a meeting for Trump’s eldest son with a Russian lawyer who he said had incriminating information about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Goldstone’s overture came as he unsuccessfully urged Trump to travel to Moscow later that year to attend a birthday celebration for his client’s father.

“Maybe he would welcome a meeting with President Putin,” Goldstone wrote in a July 24, 2015, email to Trump’s longtime personal assistant, Rhona Graff. There is no indication Trump or his assistant followed up on Goldstone’s offer.

[snip]

Scott Balber, an attorney for the pop star, Emin Agalarov, said Agalarov asked Goldstone to invite Trump to his father’s party but was not aware that the publicist dangled the possibility of meeting with Putin.

“It is certainly not the case that Emin Agalarov can arrange a meeting with Vladi­mir Putin for anybody,” Balber said.

In case you haven’t figured out, I think this is all an elaborate cover story to obscure what actually went on in the meeting and what the understanding about it was. Now that Goldstone has testified, this may start to fall apart.”

But wether Emin can setup a meeting with Putin is the wrong question-the right question is about his father, Aras. It seems likely that he is  the real key to who setup this meeting and for what reason.

For her part, Marcy Wheeler has long believed that there was a second part of the meeting.  

“If, in fact, there was a second part of this meeting, it seems to be the high level meeting that George Papadopoulos had been working on setting up for weeks, meetings discussed in the context of offering dirt in the form of emails. The Russians laid out a quo — relief of the Magnitsky sanctions — and a week later, provided the first installments of the quid — oppo research from Hillary Clinton.

That would more readily explain why, on June 14, Goldstone would forward this account of the DNC hack to Emin and Ike (but not the other attendees) declaring the DNC hack to be eerie in the wake of what transpired at the meeting.

In one email dated June 14, 2016, Goldstone forwarded a CNN story on Russia’s hacking of DNC emails to his client, Russian pop star Emin Agalarov, and Ike Kaveladze, a Russian who attended the meeting along with Trump Jr., Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Manafort, describing the news as “eerily weird” given what they had discussed at Trump Tower five days earlier.

And that, I suspect, is the real story that Scott Balber has been working so hard to obscure.”

Again, in studying the testimony, you certainly get the idea that none of the participants are giving the full truth. And that Aras Agalarov is the key to why this meeting was setup in the first place.

UPDATE: What does the Mueller Report say about the Trump Tower meeting and in what way does it speak to the question of Aras Agalarov’s involvement?

References:

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/what-mueller-found-out-about-the-trump-tower-meeting.html

https://www.npr.org/2019/04/18/714810823/mueller-report-includes-new-details-about-trump-tower-meeting

https://fortune.com/2019/04/20/trump-tower-meeting-mueller/

Emin Agalarov called his then-publicist, Rob Goldstone, on June 3, 2016, and suggested setting up a meeting between the Trump campaign and Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer, to offer Russia’s aid, according to the report. Several details about the genesis of Agalarov’s idea were redacted due to a grand jury proceeding.”

It actually wasn’t the brainchild of Emin but his father  Aras Agalarov. To fully contextualize this meeting we need to better understand the genesis-it appears the story of its genesis and Aras’ role were redacted-and so part of an ongoing GJ trial. Maybe when something happens in that trial we’ll know more.

It goes without saying that the House Democrats need to ask Mueller about it when he testifies.

More from Fortune:

Rick Gates, who was the deputy campaign chairman at the time, testified that Trump Jr. announced at a regular planning meeting that he “had a lead on negative information about the Clinton Foundation,” according to the report. But Gates also recalled inexplicably that the meeting involved Kyrgyzstan, Mueller said.

According to Gates, Manafort warned everyone that the meeting “likely would not yield vital information and they should be careful.”

That puts to bed any idea that Trump didn’t know about the meeting.

That turned out to be the case, and it may have been a blessing in disguise for Trump. When the meeting got underway at 4 p.m. that day, Trump Jr. and Kushner quickly grew impatient as they realized the dirt wasn’t the bombshell they were hoping for.”

But how does that exonerate them-they sought the information which proves intent. Also since when is ignorance of the law an excuse?

“Mueller, in his attempt to find out who knew what and when, said his team weighed whether Trump was telling the truth when he said he didn’t know about the meeting. The special counsel weighed a sequence of events surrounding a speech Trump gave at the time that “suggested that candidate Trump had contemporaneous knowledge of the June 9 meeting,” according to the report.

Again though if Jr mentioned it  at a regular meeting doesn’t that cinch that Trump did know?

At issue was Trump’s public assertion on June 7, 2016 — just as Trump Jr. was completing arrangements for the meeting with Veselnitskaya — that he would give a “major speech” the following week “discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons,” according to Mueller’s report.

Gates revelation certainly seems to prove Trump made his promise of an anti Clinton speech about the CF based on what Don Jr told him about the upcoming Trump Tower meeting.

After the Trump Tower meeting failed to produce the dirt Trump Jr. was seeking, Trump’s speech changed course. Mueller wanted to know if those developments were connected.

And yet:

“The Office did not find evidence that the original idea for the speech was connected to the anticipated June 9 meeting or that the change of topic was attributable to the failure of that meeting to produce concrete evidence about Clinton,” Mueller said.

Didn’t find evidence? What about what Rick Gates said about Jr announcing the meeting at a regular meeting about a lead on negative information about the Clinton Foundation?