documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father. This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump—helped along by Aras and Emin.”106
The information the Kremlin presents to the Trump campaign is self-assured with respect to its allegations of illegal foreign financing of Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns, and self-assured with respect to its allegations of illegal foreign financing of the Democratic Party; it is speculative with respect to illegal foreign financing of the Clinton campaign and the Clinton Foundation. Even so, it gives the Trump campaign a possible line of attack in response to any future allegations that it is receiving illegal foreign campaign donations. It also augments the potentially damaging information about the Democratic Party that will be contained in the Kremlin’s July and October leaks of hacked DNC emails. Moreover, it leaves only one piece missing in a potential allegation against Clinton herself—a missing piece Trump’s opposition research team could locate simply by determining whether the Ziff brothers had donated to Clinton’s campaign. That information was readily available to Trump staffers; indeed, it was merely a gestural gap in the information the Kremlin had provided to the campaign. A basic Google search conducted during the general election campaign would likely have revealed to Trump Jr., Manafort, or Kushner that the Ziff brothers’ largest donation to a candidate for federal office in 2016 was indeed to Hillary Clinton.107 Moreover, by June 2016 the Kremlin had represented to the Trump campaign, via a conversation between Joseph Mifsud and George Papadopoulos, that it was in possession of stolen Clinton emails, so the Trump campaign would have had, as of June 9, reason to suspect that any additional information on Clinton and the Ziff brothers held by the “Crown prosecutor of Russia” included incriminating emails written by Clinton herself. The campaign’s pursuit of such Clinton emails—which would ultimately extend through the summer of 2016 (see chapter 5)—gave candidate Trump and his policy shop every incentive to extend and even augment the campaign’s support for better relations with the Kremlin and an end to U.S. sanctions against Russia.
Both before and after his June 2016 meeting with Kremlin agents, Trump Jr. does all he can to conceal everything about the meeting from anyone but the very top brass on the Trump campaign.108 In addition to, according to his own congressional testimony, hiding the meeting from his father until the New York Times uncovers it a year later, Trump Jr. also labels his email invite to Kushner and Manafort to attend the event “private and confidential”; falsely tells “senior campaign staff” days before June 9 that while an upcoming meeting is focused explicitly on “negative information” about Clinton, the source of the information is a “group from Kyrgyzstan”; “denie[s] meeting” any “officials from Russia” for the entirety of the presidential campaign and afterward, as subsequently noted by meeting participant Rob Goldstone in an email to Emin Agalarov; and declines to be voluntarily interviewed about the meeting by the special counsel’s office.109 According to an FBI interview with Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen, Trump Jr.’s concealment of the meeting includes false testimony to Congress insisting that he never told his father of the meeting—as Cohen testifies under oath that he himself was in “Donald J. Trump’s office on June 6 or 7 when Trump Jr. told his father that a meeting to obtain adverse information about Clinton was going forward.… From the tenor of the conversation, Cohen believed that Trump Jr. had previously discussed the meeting with his father.”110
That the June 9 meeting is considered significant at the time is underscored by the fact that Trump’s de facto (soon to be official) campaign manager, Manafort, takes notes throughout, and that Trump Jr., rather than shutting down the Kremlin agents once they proffer valuable but illegal campaign assistance, tells Veselnitskaya that his father “could revisit the [sanctions] issue” if he wins the presidential election—implicitly soliciting and encouraging a continuation of “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” as previously spoken of by Goldstone.111 So it is little surprise that the New York Times will report in May 2018 that, according to two individuals familiar with the campaign’s multiple covert pre-election meetings with foreign nationals, “Trump campaign officials did not appear bothered by the idea of cooperation with foreigners.”112
Less than a week after Kremlin agents represent to the Trump campaign that the Kremlin has