This statement is pretty much the same as you hear many times from the family of an accused thief/murderer: “My son is a good boy. He wouldn’t do no harm to nobody. He’s a good, good boy.”
As someone who’s checked in on this thread periodically since the start, I think it provides a valuable public service for anyone interested in how political arguments shift over time as information comes out – and how motivated reasoning trumps factual evidence.
Would that I could go back and see a similar thread starting in 1972 titles something like “Burglars arrested during break-in at Democratic national headquarters…”
I look forward to seeing what posters will be saying on this in a week, or a month. So I vote to keep it rollin’!
“Official documents” and “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr Trump” and “the Russian government attorney” are designed to leave no doubt that Don Jr. knew he was being invited to receive information from not only a foreign national, but from an official representative of an adversarial nation’s government. (Whether the woman really was an official representative is immaterial. What matters is what Don. Jr. was told and that he agreed to the meeting.)
“Would be very useful to your father” and “…support for Mr Trump” are designed to make clear that something of value—as per the U.S. Code subsection 30121–was being offered to Don Jr. and that if he took the meeting, he would be doing so in order to receive something of value to his father’s campaign.
We know that at the time these emails were sent, the Kremlin had little reason to believe that Trump Sr. would win the Presidency. But in accordance with their standard operating procedure, they found it worthwhile to acquire Don Jr. as an asset.
Inviting him to violate US federal election laws—as these emails explicitly did—had the potential to give them operating control over Don Jr., given that if he bit, they would then have the power to expose his unlawful conduct. If Trump had lost, as expected, Don Jr. could have gone on to assist the Kremlin in material ways in their ongoing project of undermining US and other western democracies.
(So, yeah: what you picked up on–the odd artificiality in the construction of Goldstone’s emails–is there.)
Thanks. I just remember last summer when election related threads would quickly spiral into dozens of pages, which was a huge pain in the ass for the moderators. I’m just worried that I created a monster. And it actually occurred to me earlier today that my OP was the modern equivalent of mentioning that there was a break in at the Watergate.
I haven’t been paying much attention to this story lately, but everyone seems very excited about it again. Can I get someone’s CliffsNotes? Is the impeachment back on?
The title says “Trump associates may have coordinated with Russians, according to US officials”. Do we have an answer for what they coordinated together yet?
That meeting was attended by Donald Trump, Jr.; Paul Manafort (then head of Trump’s campaign); and Jared Kushner (who is now the White House’s Everything Czar).
