Tag: Trump Tower meeting

Trump Jr. reaches deal to testify with Senate Intelligence

Donald Trump Jr. has agreed to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee for a second round of questions, complying with a subpoena from Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who came under fire from fellow Republicans for demanding the testimony.

Trump Jr. struck the deal Tuesday to interview with the panel next month for between two and four hours. The committee had originally a set a 5 p.m. deadline on Monday for him to respond.

Questions about the Trump Tower project in Moscow and the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump campaign officials and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya are fair game, according to a source who was briefed on the deal.

View the complete May 14 article by Jonathan Easley and Alexander Bolton on The Hill website here.

Demolishing Erik Prince: One TV interview shows exactly how to deal with Trump’s allies

Mehdi Hasan of Al Jazeera English took Trump pal Erik Prince apart in two minutes. American media: Watch and learn.

“He can’t keep getting away with it!” was one of the lines from “Breaking Bad” in which Aaron Paul’s award-winning acting talents were on full soul-crushing display. In the climactic scene from season five, episode 12, Paul’s Jesse Pinkman cries out in mid-nervous breakdown over the fact that Bryan Cranston’s Walter White indeed keeps getting away with one murderously bad decision after another.

Somehow, Donald Trump and his crew of mostly incompetent co-conspirators seemingly keep getting away with it — flooding the zone with one trespass after another, against the rule of law or against democratic norms or against common decency. To varying extents, we’re all Jesse Pinkman these days, raging for justice and fighting against the slowly metastasizing normalization of Trumpism.

With the exception of a few fearless White House reporters, the press has mostly been hectored into submission when directly challenging the Trump team. Credit where credit is due: Playboy’s Brian Karem and CNN’s Jim Acosta have each risked their posts by refusing to be silenced mid-question by Trump’s stumpy-fingered bullying. Likewise, Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell have been particularly relentless in their coverage of the Trump crisis. The print press has provided volumes of reporting along these lines too, but too many White House journalists continue to lose their nerve when battered by Trump’s cowardly aggression against what he calls “the enemies of the people.” (Everything he says and does telegraphs his guilt.)

Blackwater founder Erik Price hid information about 2016 Trump Tower meeting while under oath: House Intel chair

Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Erik Prince hid information about his attendance at a 2016 Trump Tower meeting to discuss Iran while under oath.

In an interview with on Al Jazeera’s “Head to Head,” Price stated that he was present at an Aug. 3, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower to “talk about Iran policy,” and that he disclosed information about that meeting even though it does not appear in a transcript of his testimony.

According to Schiff, Prince, the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, is dead wrong.

View the complete March 10 article by Tom Boggioni of Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

Dems ready to issue subpoena for phone records linked to Trump Tower meeting

Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee are preparing to issue a subpoena as soon as Thursday to obtain phone records linked to the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump campaign officials and a Russian lawyer, two sources familiar with the matter tell The Hill.

The subpoena will be the first order Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) will issue as committee chairman, and the process of preparing the order came one day after the committee became formally constituted.

Details about the specifics of the subpoena remain unclear, but the order goes to the heart of the committee’s plan to investigate ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

View the complete February 7 article by Olivia Beaver on The Hill website here.

Russian lawyer at Trump Tower meeting charged in separate case

Natalia Veselnitskaya speaks to a journalist in Moscow in 2016. Credit: Yury Martyanov, Associaed Press

A Russian lawyer whose role in a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower has come under scrutiny from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was charged Tuesday with obstructing justice in a separate money-laundering investigation.

Natalia Veselnitskaya became a central figure in Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election when it was revealed that, in June of that year, she met with Donald Trump Jr. and other senior Trump campaign advisers after an intermediary indicated she had damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

[Read the indictment: United States vs. Natalia Veselnitskaya]

The indictment unsealed Tuesday relates to a different legal fight involving the Russian and U.S. governments and charges that Veselnitskaya made a “misleading declaration” to the court in 2015, as part of a civil case arising from an investigation by federal prosecutors in Manhattan into suspected Russian money laundering and tax fraud.

View the complete January 8 article by Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky on The Washington Post website here.

Federal Officials Are Investigating ‘Suspicious’ Money Transfers Made After Trump Tower Meeting: Report

BuzzFeed News is reporting the transactions occurred in the months following the June 2016 Trump Tower Meeting.

BuzzFeed News is reporting that a June 9, 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in New York City was followed by a series of money transfers that bank officials considered “suspicious.”

According to BuzzFeed, four federal law enforcement officials are analyzing two series of transactions that bank examiners found to be suspicious. One occurred not long after that June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower, and the other occurred after President Donald Trump’s victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

The first series of transactions, BuzzFeed is reporting, came on June 20, 2016—11 days after the June 9 meeting. On June 20, 2016, an offshore company run by billionaire Russian real estate developer Aras Agalarov (who has ties to both Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin) wired over $19.5 million to Agalarov’s account at a New York City bank.

View the complete September 12, 2018, article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet.org website here.

There’s a big tell in Trump’s latest defense of Donald Jr.

The following commentary by Greg Sargent was posted on the Washington Post website August 13, 2018:

Despite President Trump’s tweets, meeting with a foreign power to get ‘dirt’ is not opposition research, argues deputy editorial page editor Ruth Marcus. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)

President Trump has spent the past year and a half emphatically declaring that there was “no collusion” between his campaign and Russia, adamantly and angrily insisting that any suggestion to the contrary is nothing but a “hoax.”

Trump is now trying out a new line, which looks a little something like this: There was “no collusion” … “to the best of my knowledge.”

The Post has a remarkable piece reporting that Donald Trump Jr.’s presence on the campaign trail is in major demand among GOP candidates. Trump Jr. energizes the Trump base, in spite of the fact — or rather because of the fact — that he may be in legal jeopardy, as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III scrutinizes Trump Jr.’s role in the Trump Tower meeting and its aftermath. For many Trump voters who have been relentlessly told that Mueller is leading a “deep-state coup” against the president, Trump Jr. represents a galvanizing, heroic figure who is both resisting and getting unfairly persecuted by that coup.

View the complete article here.

President Admits Trump Tower Meeting Was Meant to Get Dirt on Clinton Image

The following article by Michael D. Shear and Michael S. Schmidt was posted on the New York Times website August 5, 2018:

President Trump with son Donald Jr. Mr. Trump denied a report he is worried about the legal exposure for his son, who hosted a June 2016 meeting between some of Mr. Trump’s top campaign advisers and a Kremlin-connected lawyer. Credit: Samuel Corum for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Sunday that a Trump Tower meeting between top campaign aides and a Kremlin-connected lawyer was designed to “get information on an opponent” — the starkest acknowledgment yet that a statement he dictated last year about the encounter was misleading.

Mr. Trump made the comment in a tweet on Sunday morning that was intended to be a defense of the June 2016 meeting and the role his son Donald Trump Jr. played in hosting it. The president claimed that it was “totally legal” and of the sort “done all the time in politics.”

But the tweet also served as an admission that the Trump team had not been forthright when Donald Trump Jr. issued a statement in July 2017 saying that the meeting had been primarily about the adoption of Russian children.

View the complete article here.

Trump just made 2 problematic admissions about the Trump Tower meeting

The following article by Aaron Blake was posted on the Washington Post website August 5, 2018:

President Trump’s lawyers now say he dictated Donald Trump Jr.’s response to the 2016 Trump Tower meeting, contradicting months of previous assertions. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)

President Trump has yet again tweeted about his personal legal issues in a way he perhaps shouldn’t have.

The Washington Post reported Saturday that Trump had expressed concerns in the past week about his son Donald Trump Jr.’s legal exposure from the 2016 Trump Tower meeting. In a tweet about that report on Sunday, Trump said, “This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics – and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!”

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower. This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics – and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Two issues.

Trump acknowledges, defends 2016 meeting between son, Kremlin-aligned lawyer

The following aricle by Ashley Parker and Rosalind S. Helderman was posted on the Washington Post website August 5, 2018:

President Trump’s lawyers now say he dictated Donald Trump Jr.’s response to the 2016 Trump Tower meeting, contradicting months of previous assertions. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)

BRIDGEWATER, N.J. — President Trump on Sunday offered his most definitive and clear public acknowledgment that his oldest son met with a Kremlin-aligned lawyer at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign to “get information on an opponent,” defending the meeting as “totally legal and done all the time in politics.”

It is, however, against the law for U.S. campaigns to receive ­donations or items of value from foreigners, and that June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Natalia Veselnitskaya is now a subject of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation.

While “collusion” is not mentioned in U.S. criminal statutes, Mueller is investigating whether anyone associated with Trump coordinated with the Russians, which could result in criminal charges if they entered into a conspiracy to break the law, including through cyberhacking or interfering with the election.

View the complete article here.