Another day, another troubling development in the latest story about the possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government during the 2016 election.
The New York Times reported late Monday that before he met with a Kremlin-tied lawyer in June 2016, Donald Trump Jr., the son of the then-presumptive Republican nominee, was “informed in an email” that the material the lawyer had that was supposedly damaging the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton was “part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy.”
Rob Goldstone, an acquaintance of Trump Jr.’s and a publicist with Russian clients, sent the email before helping set up the meeting between Trump and the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya. Goldstone told the Times that he had been asked to set up the meeting by one of his clients, Russian pop star Emin Agalarov, whose father was a partner with Donald Trump on the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Russia. As Goldstone puts it, Agalarov told him Veselnitskaya “had information about illegal contributions to the DNC,” a message which Goldstone says he sent to Trump Jr. over email.
Trump Jr. met with Veselnitskaya on June 9, 2016, in Trump Tower, with Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, then the chairman of the Trump campaign, also in attendance. In the Times’s first report on the meeting on Saturday, Trump Jr. said the meeting was about Russian adoption policy. In a follow-up on Sunday, Trump Jr. modified his story, saying that he attended the meeting because he believed Veselnitskaya had information that would be helpful to the Trump campaign, though he says he came to believe the vague and unhelpful information the lawyer offered was a “pretext” to discuss an American sanctions law that Russian president Vladimir Putin vehemently opposes.
A statement from Trump Jr.’s lawyer calls the latest Times story “much ado about nothing” but denies neither the existence of the email nor the central premise of the article—that Trump Jr. was told that the information on Hillary Clinton he was seeking came from a Russian government source. If the Times reports is true, it demonstrates that at least one figure connected to the Trump campaign was willing, on at least one occasion, to seek help from the Russian government to try to win the election. And that undoubtedly has the attention of the special counsel, Robert Mueller, and his investigation.
Once Again, More Questions Arise from Trump Jr. Story
The unfolding story of the Russian lawyer meeting creates more questions for Trumpworld. What about the other two campaign figures at the June 9 meeting, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort? And what about other members of the campaign and administration? Who knew about this meeting before, or right after, it occurred, and what did they know about the nature and origin of it? Who else besides Donald Trump Jr. knew the promised opposition research on Hillary Clinton was coming from the Russian government? Were there any other times during the campaign that Russian government officials or operatives approached the Trump campaign to shop oppo?
The White House, where Kushner is a senior aide, has said President Trump himself only learned about the meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya “in the last couple of days,” according to deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Sanders also said the president was not concerned about the nature of their meeting, describing it as “very short” and one for which Trump Jr. did not follow up. A spokesman for Manafort has consistently declined to comment on the meeting or questions surrounding it.
Vice President Mike Pence, who earlier this year denied that anyone in the Trump campaign “had any contact with the Russians,” declined through a spokesman to modify that statement. “The Vice President was not aware of the meeting,” said Pence’s press secretary, Marc Lotter, in an email to THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “He is not focused on stories about the campaign, particularly stories about the time before he joined the ticket.”
In an interview on ABC News Monday morning, White House aide Kellyanne Conway, who was named Trump’s campaign manager in August 2016, claimed “no information was received that was meaningful or helpful” at the June 9 meeting. TWS asked Conway when she learned about the meeting and that Trump Jr. did not receive “meaningful or helpful” information at it. Conway has not responded.
An Emerging ‘Plan B’ for Obamacare Repeal
The White House is hinting that the administration would support a simple repeal of Obamacare if the current health-care bill being debated in the Senate fails next week.
Marc Short, the White House’s director of legislative affairs, suggested to reporters on Monday that if Senate Republicans aren’t able to pass its Obamacare replacement bill, then President Trump would continue to push for a simpler repeal of the healthcare law—something along the lines of what congressional Republicans had voted for during the Obama administration.
“This is a promise that Republicans have made to voters, and it’s a promise that he expects them to deliver on,” Short said of Obamacare repeal. “To be clear, we still believe that the bill before the United States Senate is the preferable path. I just want to state that clearly for everybody, that that is the path that we’re planning on. But I think the president is making a very clear point that Republicans have voted many times on a repeal bill.”
With the current healthcare bill foundering in the Senate, both the president and vice president have now publicly endorsed a “repeal, then replace” strategy.
“If Republican Senators are unable to pass what they are working on now, they should immediately REPEAL, and then REPLACE at a later date!” Trump tweeted on June 30.
“If they can’t pass this carefully crafted repeal and replace bill—do those two things simultaneously—we ought to just repeal only,” Mike Pence told Rush Limbaugh on Monday.
The administration’s new strategy may be intended to ratchet up political pressure on congressional Republicans, who have so far failed to reach consensus on how to repeal and replace Obamacare.
Short said that any repeal bill the Senate considers should not pull the rug out from under the insurance market. As the simple repeal bills Republicans have supported in the past did, an acceptable “repeal-only” bill would gradually phase out several of Obamacare’s provisions, including insurance subsidies for Americans past the threshold to receive Medicaid.
“It would create basically a stabilization fund to keep the markets as they are for a period of two, three years until a replacement plan is put together,” Short said of such a bill.
