Trump campaign’s attempted collusion
FOR months, the Donald Trump campaign and his administration not only have cast doubt on the facts of Russian interference in the 2016 election but also have denied there was contact between Russian agents and Trump surrogates. We now know that this insistence was at best misleading. Top Trump officials met with a Kremlin-allied Russian lawyer in June 2016 – and they did so with the express hope of receiving compromising information about their Democratic rival.
The meeting, as first reported by the New York Times, took place after Trump had clinched the Republican presidential nomination but before the convention. Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who has campaigned against Western sanctions on Russia, met with Trump’s closest advisers: his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr; his son-in-law, Jared Kushner; and the Trump campaign chairman at the time, Paul Manafort. The meeting was suggested, as the Washington Post reported on Monday, by a Russian pop star whose family has business ties both to the Russian government and to Trump.
For months, officials failed to disclose this meeting. When the record was corrected, they then mischaracterised its purpose. Trump Jr and Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, passed it off as “a nothing meeting” that was “apparently about Russian adoption” – meaning about a controversy over whether foreigners could adopt Russian orphans. But hours later, after further reporting by the Times, the younger Trump admitted that he attended because he had been prom- ised damaging material about the Hillary Clinton campaign.
It will be up to federal prosecutors to determine whether conspiracy laws or election laws barring campaigns from soliciting help from foreigners have been implicated. What we can say is the plausibility of the Trump camp’s narrative, in which any underhanded Russian assistance came without the campaign’s witting participation, is eroding.
Trump Jr still claims he did not know the name of the person he would be meeting. His statement on the matter also indicated that, upon learning with whom he was meeting, he ended the encounter after it “became clear that she had no meaningful information”. If he had the proper concern about foreign influence on the election system, he would have immediately ended any meeting premised on the offer of campaign help when learning the other party was a Russian national.
The revelations intensify the questions surrounding Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey after Comey, according to his testimony, declined to pledge loyalty to the president. They also intensify the urgency of a careful Senate vetting of Trump’s nominee to replace Comey, Christopher Wray, who is to testify before the Senate today. Wray must commit to the independence of the FBI by detailing any conversations he had with Trump, and in particular whether the president asked him for his loyalty. He must be able to say that he made no such commitment. And he must promise he will do everything to cooperate with the special counsel’s Russia investigation.