Category Archives: Donald Trump

Bannon and Kushner recruited Blackwater founder, Erik Prince, to devise options for Afghanistan

The New York Times reports: President Trump’s advisers recruited two businessmen who profited from military contracting to devise alternatives to the Pentagon’s plan to send thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan, reflecting the Trump administration’s struggle to define its strategy for dealing with a war now 16 years old.

Erik D. Prince, a founder of the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, and Stephen A. Feinberg, a billionaire financier who owns the giant military contractor DynCorp International, have developed proposals to rely on contractors instead of American troops in Afghanistan at the behest of Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, and Jared Kushner, his senior adviser and son-in-law, according to people briefed on the conversations.

On Saturday morning, Mr. Bannon sought out Defense Secretary Jim Mattis at the Pentagon to try to get a hearing for their ideas, an American official said. Mr. Mattis listened politely but declined to include the outside strategies in a review of Afghanistan policy that he is leading along with the national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster.

The highly unusual meeting dramatizes the divide between Mr. Trump’s generals and his political staff over Afghanistan, the lengths to which his aides will go to give their boss more options for dealing with it and the readiness of this White House to turn to business people for help with diplomatic and military problems. [Continue reading…]

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Trump Jr.’s response to proposed meeting with a ‘Russian government attorney’ to get dirt on Clinton: ‘I love it’

The New York Times reports: The June 3, 2016, email sent to Donald Trump Jr. could hardly have been more explicit: One of his father’s former Russian business partners had been contacted by a senior Russian government official and was offering to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Hillary Clinton.

The documents “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” read the email, written by a trusted intermediary, who added, “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

If the future president’s elder son was surprised or disturbed by the provenance of the promised material — or the notion that it was part of a continuing effort by the Russian government to aid his father’s campaign — he gave no indication.

He replied within minutes: “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

Four days later, after a flurry of emails, the intermediary wrote back, proposing a meeting in New York on Thursday with a “Russian government attorney.” [Continue reading…]

Professor Richard L. Hasen, a nationally recognized expert in election law and campaign finance regulation who teaches at the University of California Irvine School of Law, writes:

Hard to see how there is not a serious case here of solicitation. Trump Jr. appears to have knowledge of the foreign source and is asking to see it. As I explained earlier, such information can be considered a “thing of value” for purposes of the campaign finance law.

It is also possible other laws were broken, such as the laws against coordinating with a foreign entity on an expenditure. There could also be related obstruction, racketeering, or conspiracy charges, but these are really outside my area of specialization and I cannot say.

But there’s a lot for prosecutors to sink their teeth into. Pretty close to the smoking gun people were looking for.

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As collusion evidence emerges, obstruction allegations begin to look more damaging

Alex Whiting writes: The criminal investigations of the Trump administration seem largely to have followed two separate paths: on the one hand, whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian interference with the election, and on the other hand whether President Trump obstructed justice. Commentary has alternated between these inquiries, but has not always connected the two. In part that is because of the piecemeal way the evidence has emerged. In part it is because the two inquiries have distinct legal elements and can, in fact, exist separately. However, at a moment when our attention is focused on the question of possible collusion, it is worth remembering this obvious point: the two investigations are, in fact, very much connected. As evidence mounts of one set of crimes (collusion), it also supports the other (obstruction).

As I set forth here, and here, the obstruction investigation is likely focused at the moment on whether President Trump sought improperly to influence or shut down the FBI’s investigations into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and/or investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Because Trump’s actions are largely not in serious dispute, the focus has mainly been on his intent, that is, did he act “corruptly” or with an improper purpose in his interactions with FBI Director James Comey, or in his subsequent firing of Comey?

To the extent it was believed that there was no underlying story of wrongdoing by the Trump campaign with respect to Russian interference with the presidential election, the obstruction allegations seemed to float on their own. Despite the old adage that “the cover-up is always worse than the crime,” obstruction charges will be harder to prove if in fact there were no improprieties to hide. Remember that prosecutors exercise considerable discretion in deciding whether to bring charges, and in making that decision they will assess not only whether the individual’s conduct and intent satisfies all the elements of the alleged crime, but also whether it feels like criminal conduct, whether the jury will be persuaded to convict.

Regarding Trump, if it seemed that Trump was acting only to block the investigation and prosecution of Michael Flynn’s individual acts of alleged wrongdoing, some of which themselves might raise questions about whether they warrant criminal charges, a prosecutor might hesitate (not to mention Congress, when considering the question of impeachment). Could the prosecutor persuade the jury that when Trump asked Comey to let the Flynn investigation go, Trump wasn’t just trying, in his bumbling Trump sort of a way, to put in a good word for Flynn? Could the prosecutor persuade the jury that in firing Comey, Trump had not simply concluded that Comey was badly mishandling the Russia investigation and had to be replaced by a more effective Director?

Many might think that the evidence is already sufficient to overcome such defenses, but the point is that absent some indication of a larger, self-interested, cover-up, the ultimate factfinders – whether they be on a jury or in Congress – might be more likely to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, grabbing onto these explanations as a way to excuse Trump’s conduct. And that is why the emerging collusion evidence could end up mattering so much to the obstruction inquiry. It has the potential to change everything. Suddenly, Trump’s actions to stop the FBI’s investigations, not to mention his incessant tweets and public statements about the Russia inquiries, feel much more sinister. [Continue reading…]

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When the Kremlin says ‘adoptions,’ it means ‘sanctions’

Amanda Taub writes: President Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. initially defended his meeting with a Russian lawyer connected to the Kremlin during the 2016 presidential campaign by saying that it was primarily about adoption — a seemingly innocent humanitarian issue.

Reinstating American adoptions of Russian orphans certainly seems like a far less serious matter than a meeting about, say, the removal of United States sanctions on certain Russian officials.

But from the Russian perspective, whether the younger Mr. Trump and his associates knew it at the time or not, the issues of adoptions and sanctions are so inextricably linked as to be practically synonymous. (Mr. Trump said in a later statement that the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, had also promised to give him compromising information about Hillary Clinton.)

Understanding the connections between adoptions and sanctions offers a lens into the worldview and foreign policy goals of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and into how even a meeting that really did focus primarily on adoption would also have been about much more. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump Jr. hires lawyer experienced in defending clients with ties to Mafia and involvement in cybercrime

BuzzFeed reports: News archives show that [a New York criminal defense attorney, Alan] Futerfas [just hired by Donald Trump Jr.] has long represented clients with alleged ties to organized crime, including alleged members of the Bonanno, Gambino, Genovese, and Colombo crime families. Last year, he represented the son of a New York pizzeria owner who was found guilty of drug-related charges in a case that stemmed from an investigation into drug trafficking by the Italian mafia.

Futerfas has also handled several cybercrime cases. His clients have included a Russian man who created computer malware and rented it out to criminals to rob banks, and an Israeli man who was one of several defendants charged in a massive hack of consumer data from JPMorgan Chase and other financial institutions. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s trolls are waging war on America’s civil servants

Kate Brannen, Dan De Luce and Jenna McLaughlin report: On June 11, alt-right blogger Mike Cernovich published an article attacking an assistant to National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, claiming the previously low-profile civil servant wanted to “sabotage” President Donald Trump.

The piece described Eric Ciaramella as “pro-Ukraine and anti-Russia” and alleged, with no evidence, that he was possibly responsible for high-level leaks. The response to the piece included online threats of violence against Ciaramella, which contributed to his decision to leave his job at the the National Security Council a few weeks early, according to two sources familiar with the situation.

Although the harassment was not the only factor, one of the two sources said they “distinctly got the impression” that the departure was premature, partially because of “right-wing” harassment.

Ciaramella is not alone. Cernovich, who claims his Twitter feed receives over 100 million views every month, has been relentless in his criticism of McMaster and those around him. Cernovich’s writings and tweets have included false information, but sometimes they include details that only someone on the inside could know. For example, his tweets about Ciaramella were so specific that they documented meetings and lunches the NSC staffer had with certain people.

After Ciaramella left the NSC, Cernovich turned his attacks on Twitter against his prospective successor, who has not been publicly announced.

Career civil servants often endure stressful working conditions, but in the Trump White House, some of them face online trolling from alt-right bloggers who seek to portray them as clandestine partisans plotting to sabotage the president’s agenda. The online attacks often cite information that appears to be provided by unnamed White House officials or Trump loyalists.

The trend has unnerved the career intelligence analysts, diplomats, security experts, and military officers who are accustomed to operating outside the political arena. Coupled with White House talking points accusing government employees of jeopardizing the country’s security through leaks to the media, the online abuse threatens to damage morale and politicize institutions long seen as impartial and above partisan combat. [Continue reading…]

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Knuckleheads in Trump administration don’t want to let foreign entrepreneurs start new businesses in U.S.

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration said it would delay, and probably eliminate down the line, a federal rule that would have let foreign entrepreneurs come to the United States to start companies.

The decision, announced by the federal government on Monday ahead of its official publication on Tuesday, was quickly slammed by business leaders and organizations, especially from the technology sector, which has benefited heavily from start-ups founded by immigrants.

“Today’s announcement is extremely disappointing and represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the critical role immigrant entrepreneurs play in growing the next generation of American companies,” Bobby Franklin, the president and chief executive of the National Venture Capital Association, a trade association for start-up investors, said in a statement.

He added that even as other countries are going all out to attract entrepreneurs, “the Trump administration is signaling its intent to do the exact opposite.”

The policy being delayed by the Department of Homeland Security, known as the International Entrepreneur Rule, was to go into effect next week, after being approved by President Obama in January during his final days in office.

The rule was enacted to give foreign entrepreneurs who received significant financial backing for new business ventures the ability to come temporarily to the United States to build their companies. Silicon Valley leaders had praised the rule as a kind of “start-up visa.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump Jr. was told in email of Russian effort to aid campaign

The New York Times reports: Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email.

The email to the younger Mr. Trump was sent by Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid reporter who helped broker the June 2016 meeting. In a statement on Sunday, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he was interested in receiving damaging information about Mrs. Clinton, but gave no indication that he thought the lawyer might have been a Kremlin proxy.

Mr. Goldstone’s message, as described to The New York Times by the three people, indicates that the Russian government was the source of the potentially damaging information. It does not elaborate on the wider effort by Moscow to help the Trump campaign. [Continue reading…]

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New facts in the potential criminal case of Trump campaign coordination with Russia

Bob Bauer writes: A Russian lawyer [Natalia Veselnitskaya] with ties to state owned enterprises and to a senior government official met with Trump campaign officials shortly in June of 2016, shortly after the nomination was decided. Donald Trump, Jr., the campaign manager Paul Manafort and the President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner all attended the meeting. With Manafort’s presence in particular the connection to the campaign is clear.

The significance of this extraordinary meeting, now confirmed by Donald Trump, Jr. lies in the reason why the campaign agreed to it. According to a statement from Donald Jr., there was on the campaign’s part an “expectation” that the Russians would have negative information to offer about Hillary Clinton. The result, so Trump Jr. now claims, was disappointing: “It quickly became clear that she [the Russia lawyer] had no meaningful information.” He now dismisses her claim to have had this material as mere “pretext” for the meeting. The President’s son is admitting that the campaign arranged the meeting solely to get this information.

Trump Jr. suggests that he did not know of the Russian connection: he did not know the identity of the individual offering the information, including the fact that she was a foreign national. And he would have it believed that when he invited Kushner and Manafort to join the meeting, he did not tell them, because he did not know, that the lawyer was a Russian–or who she was. And, apparently, when she came in and introduced herself, the Trump campaign team was still uninformed about her identity and did not ask about it. Suffice it to say that this is a strange account and investigators will probe it deeply. And if there is any truth to it, it is not clear how much it helps Trump Jr. and his colleagues: one explanation for their ignorance of whom they were dealing with is “willful blindness,” which is not helpful to their legal position.

This new and remarkable information adds considerably to the potential criminal violation of the federal law that prohibits “substantial assistance” to foreign nationals seeking to influence a federal election. Now we have, as part of the public record, specific and private actions to establish intent to provide this assistance. Donald Trump can’t very well sustain his position that in calling for the Russians to find the missing email, he was merely joking. His campaign was furthering behind closed doors the objective that the candidate was “jokingly” professing. If confirmed and further developed in the Mueller investigation, these facts also bolster the campaign’s exposure to “aiding and abetting” liability for a campaign finance violation.

There are two additional grounds for that criminal liability: the campaign’s “coordination” with Russian foreign national sources, as a result of which it received an illegal contribution, and its “solicitation” of this illegal contribution, each of which independently violate the law.

A charge of illegal coordination is consistent with a conspiracy, aiding or abetting, or “substantial assistance” source of liability. It is the campaign finance law equivalent to what has been referred to in the public debate as “collusion.” In other words coordination is a legally prohibited form of collusion: spending by Russia, if coordinated with the campaign, is a contribution to the campaign. The contribution, of course, would be illegal. It is important to underscore here that this area of law applies to any and all coordinated spending beneficial to the campaign, not only to coordination with Russians, the Russian government, or other foreign nationals (think: Wikileaks). [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, has hired New York lawyer Alan Futerfas to represent him in connection with Russia-related investigations, the lawyer and Trump Jr.’s office said on Monday.

Futerfas, a sole practitioner who specializes in criminal defense, would not say when he was retained or whether he had any input into the statements Trump Jr. made over the weekend about a meeting with a Russian lawyer.

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Donald Trump Jr. in legal danger for Russia meeting about Clinton dirt

Politico reports: It’s far from clear whether Trump Jr. will end up facing any charges related to his meeting, but several lawyers said there is plenty of fodder for investigators to look at.

“This is treason,” Richard Painter, a former George W. Bush White House ethics lawyer, wrote Sunday night on Twitter. “He must have known that the only way Russia would get such information was by spying.”

Painter added in another message: “In the Bush administration we could have had him in custody for questioning by now.”

Jennifer Taub, a white-collar attorney and Vermont Law School professor, posted on Twitter a 20-part message Monday that cited a specific section of the U.S. criminal code that Trump Jr. may have crossed concerning prohibitions on conspiracy to defraud the U.S. “Potential indictments are coming into clear focus,” she wrote.

Former Bill Clinton White House counsel Jack Quinn said Trump Jr.’s meeting to discuss opposition research during a campaign “is not in and of itself illegal.” But Quinn nonetheless said it “will be a subject of exploration by Mr. Mueller.”

Norm Eisen, a former chief White House ethics attorney, called the Trump Jr. meeting with the Russian lawyer “very unusual” and cited several parts of federal criminal statute that may have been breached, including the Logan Act, a 1799 law barring private citizens from interfering with diplomatic relations between the U.S. and foreign governments. The law has been enforced only once — more than 200 years ago — but still remains a potent political cudgel.

“In decades of working on campaigns and as an election lawyer, I have never personally witnessed or authorized anything like this,” Eisen said. “In a normal campaign, this would be the most crimson of red flags and would not be undertaken without counsel and candidate consent, which raises the question of whether Trump himself had any indication of this.”

Eisen also said the Trump Jr.- Veselnitskaya meeting raises questions about whether “the Trump campaign welcomed Russian help in the form of dirty tricks; if so, that could confer conspiracy liability for any Russian cyber or other crimes that followed.”

GOP and Democratic campaign operatives said Trump Jr. wasn’t practicing the typical behavior one does when dealing with potential opposition research.

“Running @marcorubio camp lots of random people asked to meet to share “secret oppo” I was just never dumb enough to meet w/ them #ButWeLost,” Terry Sullivan, the former campaign manager for Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 GOP primary campaign, posted Monday on Twitter.

Republican strategist Stuart Stevens also posted Sunday night on Twitter about the unusual nature of the Trump Jr. meeting. “When Gore campaign was sent Bush debate brief book, they called FBI. If foreign interests offer you info on former SOS, you call the FBI,” he wrote. [Continue reading…]

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Jared Kushner tried and failed to get a half-billion-dollar bailout from Qatar

The Intercept reports: Not long before a major crisis ripped through the Middle East, pitting the United States and a bloc of Gulf countries against Qatar, Jared Kushner’s real estate company had unsuccessfully sought a critical half-billion-dollar investment from one of the richest and most influential men in the tiny nation, according to three well-placed sources with knowledge of the near transaction.

Kushner is a senior adviser to President Trump, and also his son-in-law, and also the scion of a New York real estate empire that faces an extreme risk from an investment made by Kushner in the building at 666 Fifth Avenue, where the family is now severely underwater.

Qatar is facing an ongoing blockade led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and joined by Egypt and Bahrain, which President Trump has taken credit for sparking. Kushner, meanwhile, has reportedly played a key behind-the-scenes role in hardening the U.S. posture toward the embattled nation.

That hard line comes in the wake of the previously unreported half-billion-dollar deal that was never consummated. Throughout 2015 and 2016, Jared Kushner and his father, Charles, negotiated directly with a major investor in Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, known as HBJ for short, in an effort to refinance the property on Fifth Avenue, the sources said.

Trump himself has unsuccessfully sought financing in recent years from the Qataris, but it is difficult to overstate just how important the investment at 666 Fifth Avenue is for Kushner, his company, and his family’s legacy in real estate. Without some outside intervention or unforeseen turnaround in the market, the investment could become an embarrassing half-billion-dollar loss. It’s unclear precisely how much peril such a loss would put Jared’s or his family’s finances in, given the opacity of their private holdings. [Continue reading…]

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Trump Jr. met lawyer linked to accused Russian money launderer

The Daily Beast reports: The Russian woman who held a secret meeting with a troika of President Trump’s top campaign staff is the chief orchestrator of Moscow’s efforts to overturn one of President Vladimir Putin’s most hated American interventions against his regime.

Natalia Veselnitskaya’s mission is to destroy the Magnitsky Act—a package of U.S. sanctions that targets corrupt Russian officials and their comrades.

She is alleged to have lured senior members of the Trump family into the meeting with a promise of compromising information about Hillary Clinton.

The 42-year-old Veselnitskaya is also lawyer to Denis Katsyv, who has paid out millions of dollars in the wake of money-laundering cases brought by authorities in the U.S. and Israel, while assets linked to him have been frozen in the Netherlands and Switzerland, as previously reported by The Daily Beast.

Some of the financial-crime cases brought against Katsyv allege that his company profited from the $230 million fraud uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who subsequently died under suspicious circumstances in Russian custody. [Continue reading…]

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Trump is full of lies and Putin is full of tricks

Charles M Blow writes: Team Trump wants us all to get over this annoying Russia thing and just move on. Sorry sir, not going to happen.

At the G-20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany, Donald Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the man whose thumb was all over the scale that delivered Trump’s victory. It was like a father meeting his offspring. But was it their first meeting? Maybe, maybe not.

For years Trump claimed not only that he had met Putin, but also that the two men had a great relationship.

Then in July 2016 came the about-face. At a news conference, Trump said, “I never met Putin,” and “I don’t know who Putin is.” This, coincidentally, was the same news conference at which he encouraged Russia’s cyberattack of Hillary Clinton’s campaign to “find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

Thereafter, Trump would repeatedly deny meeting Putin or knowing him.

Clearly, Trump having a great relationship with Putin, and Trump not knowing Putin at all, cannot both be true.

I say this to remind you of something that you can never allow to become normal and never allow to become acceptable: Our “president” is a pathological liar. He lies about everything, all the time. Lying is his resting condition.

Therefore, absolutely nothing he or his team says is to be believed, ever. [Continue reading…]

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Steve Bannon is back in Trump’s good graces and leading the attack against Robert Mueller

Joshua Green reports: On May 22, just as a strange photo of President Trump, Saudi king Salman, and Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi touching a glowing orb reached the apex of its memehood, Steve Bannon, who was lurking somewhere beyond the orb’s glow, got on a plane in Riyadh and flew back to his book-stuffed apartment in a glass high-rise in Arlington, Virginia.

For Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, the months leading up to the trip had been difficult ones. When Trump became president, Bannon quickly entered the popular imagination as both the dark mastermind of Trump’s upset victory and an ethno-nationalist ideologue who, with Trump, would lay siege to “the administrative state” and remake American government in Trump’s image. That agenda brought an early flurry of activity followed by a series of embarrassing upsets: Federal courts blocked Trump’s travel ban from seven Muslim countries, his national-security adviser Michael Flynn left under a cloud of suspicion, and the White House quickly descended into knife-fighting disarray.

Worse for Bannon was that his portrayal as Trump’s puppet-master — as #PresidentBannon — on Saturday Night Live and elsewhere infuriated a boss sharply attuned to his media image and allergic to sharing the stage, especially with someone thought to be controlling him. The killer blow was a February 13 Time cover featuring Bannon’s menacing visage above the headline “The Great Manipulator.”

Soon after the Time cover, encouraged by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Trump humiliated Bannon by stripping him of his position on the National Security Council, cutting him out of key meetings, and declining to voice his faith in Bannon, who he pointedly told The Wall Street Journal was just “a guy who works for me.” He later added that he was his own strategist. Even Bannon’s old friend Matt Drudge turned on him, fanning stories on the Drudge Report that highlighted his fall from power. “Drudge and Bannon have been close forever,” says one outside Bannon ally. “That was a big stab in the back for Steve.” Meanwhile, rumors spread that Kushner was trying to force Bannon out, a claim longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone amplified on Alex Jones’s radio show. Bannon griped to a White House colleague that Kushner was trying to “shiv him and push him out the door,” according to the Daily Beast.

Even as he was bottoming out, Bannon spied the next upturn. [Continue reading…]

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Does Trump have a point about Obama and Russia?

Susan Glasser writes: Did President Obama “choke,” as his successor has now taken to claiming, by failing to respond more aggressively to the Russian hacking of the 2016 election?

For President Trump to say so carries more than a whiff of hypocrisy given that even now he refuses to unreservedly accept that the Russians were responsible and in nearly six months in office has done nothing about it himself. But even top Democrats are now increasingly acknowledging that he may have a point about Obama.

Obama’s former national security adviser, Thomas Donilon, says as much in a new interview for The Global Politico, telling me there’s “no doubt about it” that Obama should have publicly pinned the blame on the Russians much sooner and taken more aggressive steps to retaliate.

Donilon, a Washington lawyer and longtime Democratic player going back to his days as a junior staffer in Jimmy Carter’s White House, advised Obama through many of the key moments of his early presidency and went on to help lead the national security transition for what he expected to be the Hillary Clinton administration. Normally cautious, careful and exacting, Donilon argues that Obama as early as last summer should have made “aggressive public attribution” that Russia was responsible, long before the president ultimately did so last October just a few weeks before the election.

“Given the fact that they were attacking a fundamental element of our democracy,” Donilon says in the interview, the Obama administration should have been “pushing back harder and publicly” rather than worrying so much about appearing to use the national security apparatus for partisan ends or assuming a Clinton victory would end the matter. That “would have been a better course of action, frankly.” [Continue reading…]

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Will Congress hold Russia accountable for the behavior Trump excuses?

David Frum writes: From the start of the Trump-Russia story, there have been many secrets, but no mysteries.

Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump. Donald Trump publicly welcomed that help, and integrated the fruits of Russian intervention into his closing campaign argument. (“I love WikiLeaks!”) Since being elected he has attempted to tilt American policy toward Russia, above all by his persistent and repeated attempts to lift the sanctions imposed by President Obama to punish Russia for its invasion of Crimea in 2014 and for its election-meddling in 2016.

Uncertainties remain: Did the Trump campaign actively coordinate its messaging with Russia? Were any U.S. laws violated along the way? What exactly are Trump’s motives? What are Russia’s? And Sunday’s latest revelations added one more: Was Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a shady Russian lawyer who offered dirt on Hillary Clinton in any way connected to the WikiLeaks drop a few days later?

But the basic story line is clear. It was clear in real time—and it’s clearer than ever after the Hamburg summit. Whatever exactly happened at the meeting between Trump and Putin, the president’s Sunday morning Twitter storm confirms: Trump has accepted Putin’s denials as the final word on the matter.

Why would not Trump accept it? He has insisted that the accounts of Russian interference in the US election are a “made-up story,” a hoax by sore-loser Democrats. Putin told Trump nothing that Trump did not already believe—or anyway, that Trump wanted everyone else to believe. If there was any question before Hamburg, that question was settled at Hamburg: There will be no consequences for Russia. They attacked American electoral processes and succeeded. The president Russia helped to install will not punish Russia for helping to install him. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s son met with Russian lawyer after being promised damaging information on Clinton

The New York Times reports: President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign, according to three advisers to the White House briefed on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it.

The meeting was also attended by his campaign chairman at the time, Paul J. Manafort, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kushner only recently disclosed the meeting, though not its content, in confidential government documents described to The New York Times.

The Times reported the existence of the meeting on Saturday. But in subsequent interviews, the advisers and others revealed the motivation behind it.

The meeting — at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, two weeks after Donald J. Trump clinched the Republican nomination — points to the central question in federal investigations of the Kremlin’s meddling in the presidential election: whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians. The accounts of the meeting represent the first public indication that at least some in the campaign were willing to accept Russian help. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s plan to work with Putin on cybersecurity makes no sense. Here’s why

Henry Farrell writes: During the Obama administration, the United States and China reached an agreement on how to deal with contentious issues in cybersecurity. Both the United States and China hack into each other’s systems on a regular basis. The agreement was not intended to stop this but to prevent it from getting out of control in ways that might damage bilateral arrangements. Thus, the agreement created a kind of hotline for communication and information sharing about potentially problematic behavior, as well as a continuing dialogue on cyber issues. It also ruled out efforts by state actors to steal intellectual property (the United States had persistently complained that Chinese state hackers stole U.S. companies’ secrets and passed them on to Chinese competitor firms). To the surprise of many in the United States, the agreement seems to have helped moderate Chinese efforts to steal commercial secrets, although there is disagreement over whether this was because China was shamed and wanted to preserve honor, or alternatively used the agreement to impose control over unruly hackers.

Either way, this deal worked — to the extent it did work — because both states had roughly convergent interests over a very limited set of issues. It did not involve the exchange of truly sensitive information — China does not trust the United States with details of its defenses against cyberattacks, and the United States does not trust China. Instead, the two sides have looked to manage their disagreement, rather than engage in deep and extensive cooperation.

That doesn’t appear to be what Trump wants

As Trump has described his discussions with Putin, both want something much more far-reaching than the deal that Obama reached with China. Instead of setting up dialogue, Trump wants to engage in true cooperation. He wants to set up a joint “unit” that would handle election security issues so as to prevent hacking. This unit would, furthermore, be “impenetrable.”

Critics in the United States have unsurprisingly interpreted this proposal as a transparent ploy by Trump to sideline accusations that Russian hackers helped him win the presidential election. However, even if Trump’s proposal is taken at face value, it doesn’t make much sense.

U.S. officials don’t trust the Russians

If the proposed cybersecurity unit were to work effectively, the United States would need to share extensive information with Russia on how U.S. officials defend elections against foreign tampering. The problem is, however, that information that is valuable for defending U.S. systems is, almost by definition, information that is valuable for attacking them, too. This is one reason U.S. officials have not previously proposed any far-reaching arrangement with Russia on cybersecurity. Providing such information would almost certainly give the Russians a map of vulnerabilities and insecurities in the system that they could then exploit for their own purposes.

It would not only provide the fox with a map of the henhouse, but give him the security code, the backdoor key, and a wheelbarrow to make off with the carcasses. [Continue reading…]

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