ANALYSIS by Susan Page
SMOKE, meet fire. For a year, Donald Trump and everyone associated with him – his family, his strategists, his vice president, his official spokesmen and himself – indignantly have insisted there was nothing at all to the “disgusting” and “phony” and “outrageous” suggestions that Team Trump had anything to do with Russians who might have been trying to meddle in America’s election.
But on Tuesday, the basic elements of collusion within President Trump’s closest circle were detailed in black and white in a string of emails to and from Donald Trump Jnr.
In them, a former Trump business partner offered to act as the go-between with a senior Russian government official offering dirt on Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.
“I love it,” the President’s oldest son replied within a few minutes.
It’s always the emails, right?
The blockbuster disclosure in the wake of The New York Times’ scoops about the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 undercut the credibility of all those denials by Mr Trump Jnr (“lies”) and Mr Trump Snr (“fake news” and “a hoax”) and everybody else. It stokes the most serious questions about improprieties in a Presidential election in more than four decades, when the Watergate scandal forced Richard Nixon to resign.
Now the famous Watergate questions loom over this scandal: What did the President know, and when did he know it?
For what it’s worth, Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the President’s private legal team, said Mr Trump Snr wasn’t aware of the meeting. White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the President had learned of the meeting only “in the last couple of days.” Alan Futerfas, Mr Trump Jnr’s private lawyer, released a statement saying: “His father knew nothing about it.”
The president himself wasn’t providing much illumination.
But Mr Trump Snr hasn’t put himself within shouting distance of a reporter since he returned from the G20 summit in Germany on Saturday. While he has deployed his favoured means of communication on a range of topics – posting tweets that mourned those killed in the crash of a military plane in Mississippi, declared that he was “working hard” to land the Olympics for Los Angeles, and denounced Democratic “obstruction” in the Senate – they pointedly didn’t include the subject in the headlines.
The eclectic cast of characters in the unfolding story sounds almost comic: Rob Goldstone, a British-born publicist who was friends with Emin, a Russian pop star who is the son of Aras Agalarov, a real-estate tycoon who got to know Mr Trump when he brought the Miss Universe contest to Moscow in 2013.
Then there’s Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, said to be close to Yury Yakovlevich Chaika, the prosecutor general of Russia who was appointed by President Vladimir Putin.
Which gets us back to the beginning. In his original email, Goldstone wrote: “The Crown prosecutor of Russia [presumably a reference to Chaika] met his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.”
Six days later, Mr Trump Jnr was sitting down with Veselnitskaya. He brought along his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, as well as his father’s top political strategist at the time, Paul Manafort. The reason the emails are so stunning is that so much is stated plainly: Goldstone was offering campaign dirt from the highest ranks of the Russian government.
And Mr Trump Jnr was eager to hear all about it.
One more thing, Mr Trump Jnr and Manafort, at the least, have known all about that for more than a year, despite their flat denials. So did Mr Kushner, now one of the most influential senior advisers within the White House. He already has been forced to revise the disclosure reports he had to submit to get his security clearance.
In response, congressional Democrats expressed shock. Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, who was Mrs Clinton’s running mate, told CNN Mr Trump Jnr’s conduct was “potentially treason”.
Congressional Republicans mostly ducked. And Vice-President Mike Pence, in a statement by press secretary Marc Lotter that tried to put some distance between him and the furore, said he was “not focused on stories about the campaign, particularly stories about the time before he joined the ticket”.
Much remains unknown, including exactly what the information might have been, and whether or how it was used.
But the US intelligence community months ago unanimously concluded Moscow had meddled in the election, with the goal of defeating Mrs Clinton and electing Mr Trump.
And it is now almost impossible to imagine that President Trump will be able to curtail the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, appointed after FBI director James Comey was fired.
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