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Freeloading Rusty

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
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Freeloading Rusty

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,588
Ted Williams' head

Ted Williams' head

It's freezing in here!
Sep 23, 2015
11,283
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The wall is a colossal waste of money. People are going to find a way over the wall regardless of how big you build it.

What Trump needs to do is take steps to making it harder and harder for illegals to stay in America. Take the money you'd waste on a wall and put it into ICE and creating monetary incentives for people to turn in illegals.

Don't make Mexico pay for a wall, make Mexico pay to incarcerate illegals who are caught in America and deported back to Mexico.
 
Freeloading Rusty

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
26,916
26,588
Ivanka Trump takes Donald Trump seat at G20 leaders' table - BBC News
In an unusual move Ivanka Trump briefly took her father Donald's seat at a summit of world leaders on Saturday.

The US president had stepped away for a meeting with the Indonesian leader during the G20 meeting.

Ms Trump is an adviser to her father, but a leader's absence is usually covered by high-ranking officials.

A BBC correspondent at the summit said he could recall no similar precedent. There has been widespread criticism on social media.

Mr Trump returned a short while later to retake his seat between the British prime minister and the Chinese president.

Ms Trump did not seem to make any major contribution to the session on African migration and health during her father's absence.
 
Freeloading Rusty

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
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View: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/884378624660582405



Trump Jr. Promised Negative Hillary Information In Campaign Meeting With Russian Lawyer: Donald Trump Jr. was promised damaging information on Hillary Clinton ahead of a meeting held with a Kremlin-connected lawyer during the election. Former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Trump son-in-law and current adviser Jared Kushner attended the meeting. Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and Trump Jr. confirmed the meeting. Trump Jr. offered two perspectives on the meeting. First, he told the Times that him and the Russian lawyer only discussed adoption issues. Later, he told the Times that he took the meeting as a favor to a friend from the Ms. Universe pageant, and that she tried to tell him that the DNC was receiving money from the Russians.


View: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/884361623514656769

Half Of Comey's Trump Memos Contain Classified Information: Half of the highly sought after memos that former FBI Director James Comey took after every personal interaction he had with President Trump contain classified information, according the The Hill. If that analysis is true, Comey is most likely guilty of breaking the same privacy laws that he so gravely accused Hillary Clinton of breaking during the 2016 campaign. Comey shared his memos with friends, and leaked them to journalists (according to his own Senate testimony).
 
Freeloading Rusty

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
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Analysis | Donald Trump Jr. just contradicted a whole bunch of White House denials of Russian contacts

Donald Trump Jr. acknowledged Sunday that he met with a Russian lawyer who had promised damaging information on Hillary Clinton in June 2016.

The news, which was first reported by the New York Times, represents the most direct suggestion to date of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and it is the first indication that someone from President Trump's inner circle met with Russians during the campaign. Trump Jr. also brought then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Trump's son-in-law and now-top White House adviser Jared Kushner to the meeting.

But the information isn't just troubling because it suggests the Trump campaign sought out the help of Russians to win the presidency. It also contradicts a number of claims made by the White House, the campaign and Trump Jr. himself — claims made as recently as this weekend. For an administration and campaign that have repeatedly denied contact with Russians and had their denials blow up in their faces, it's yet another dubious chapter.

Let's recap all the times they suggested this kind of thing never happened.

1) Trump Jr. on Saturday: The meeting was about Russian adoption

When the Times first reported the meeting on Saturday, Trump Jr. said that it was about the issue of Russian adoptions and not the campaign.

“We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up,” he said.

Upshot: This statement from Trump Jr. was highly misleading, at best, and it was contradicted just a day later. Clearly the pretext for the meeting was the campaign, and he pretty clearly sought to hide that fact.

2) Trump Jr. in March: No meetings “representing the campaign” with Russians

Trump Jr. told the Times in March that he never met with any Russians while working in a campaign capacity.

“Did I meet with people that were Russian? I’m sure, I’m sure I did,” he said. “But none that were set up. None that I can think of at the moment. And certainly none that I was representing the campaign in any way, shape or form.”

pshot: We now learn that one meeting was, in fact, “set up” and that it was about the campaign.

3) President-elect Trump in January: No contact between Trump associates and Russia during campaign

Following a news conference in which Trump didn't directly answer a question about whether there were contacts between his campaign or associates and Russia, Trump flatly denied that there were, according to two reporters who chased him down.


View: https://twitter.com/Acosta/status/819233642790715398


View: https://twitter.com/CeciliaVega/status/819541223182630920


Upshot: We don't know precisely the question and the answer that Trump gave after the news conference, but he was asked during the news conference, “Can you stand here today, once and for all, and say that no one connected to you or your campaign had any contact with Russia leading up to or during the presidential campaign?” CNN's Jim Acosta and ABC's Cecilia Vega say he replied “no” when asked again later.

4) Hope Hicks: "No communication" with a foreign entity

The campaign spokeswoman offered a blanket denial on Nov. 11, shortly after Trump was elected and the Kremlin said Russian experts had met with his staff.

"It never happened," Hicks said. "There was no communication between the campaign and any foreign entity during the campaign."

Upshot: This denial was so broad that it has now been proven false on multiple occasions.

5) Kellyanne Conway in December: “Absolutely not” on contact with Russians trying to meddle

On CBS's “Face the Nation”:

JOHN DICKERSON: Did anyone involved in the Trump campaign have any contact with Russians trying to meddle with the election?

CONWAY: Absolutely not. And I discussed that with the president-elect just last night. Those conversations never happened. I hear people saying it like it's a fact on television. That is just not only inaccurate and false, but it's dangerous and it does undermine our democracy.

Upshot: The most charitable read here would be that Conway interpreted the question as being about hacking or other official government meddling. The Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, says she wasn't working on behalf of the Kremlin. But she has ties to the Kremlin and has a history of pushing issues that are key to its agenda. And it's difficult not to see what she did as a form of meddling or influencing the campaign.

6) Vice President Pence in January: “Of course not”

On “Fox News Sunday” on Jan. 15, when Pence passed along Michael Flynn's faulty information about his contact with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after the campaign, Pence also denied any contact between the campaign and the Kremlin or Russian meddlers.

WALLACE: I’m asking a direct question: Was there any contact in any way between Trump or his associates and the Kremlin or cutouts they had?

PENCE: I joined this campaign in the summer, and I can tell you that all the contact by the Trump campaign and associates was with the American people. We were fully engaged with taking his message to make America great again all across this country. That’s why he won in a landslide election.

(CROSSTALK)

WALLACE: — if there were any contacts, sir, I’m just trying to get an answer.

PENCE: Yes. I — of course not. Why would there be any contacts between the campaign? Chris, the — this is all a distraction, and it's all part of a narrative to delegitimize the election and to question the legitimacy of this presidency. The American people see right through it.

And here he was the same day on “Face the Nation”:

DICKERSON: Just to button up one question, did any adviser or anybody in the Trump campaign have any contact with the Russians who were trying to meddle in the election?

MIKE PENCE: Of course not. And I think to suggest that is to give credence to some of these bizarre rumors that have swirled around the candidacy.

Upshot: The second denial is about Russian “meddling,” and the first one is about “contact in any way between Trump or his associates and the Kremlin or cutouts they had.” Again, the best explanation here for the Trump team would be that the Russian lawyer wasn't trying to meddle and wasn't working on behalf of the Kremlin. But the denial is pretty broad.

7) Spicer in February: Doesn't change Trump's January statement

White House press secretary Sean Spicer was asked if Trump's comments from after the January news conference still stood, and he didn't amend them:

QUESTION: Back in January, the president said that nobody in his campaign had been in touch with the Russians. Now today, can you still say definitively that nobody on the Trump campaign — not even General Flynn — had any contact with the Russians before the election?

SPICER: My understanding is that what General Flynn has now expressed is that during the transition period — well, we were very clear that during the transition period, he did — he did speak with the ambassador.

QUESTION: I'm talking about during the campaign.

SPICER: I don't have any — I — there's nothing that would conclude me that anything different has changed with respect to that time period.

Upshot: The White House apparently didn't dig too hard to verify Trump's denial, because it was another five months before this meeting with a Russian was revealed.

8) Trump Jr. in July 2016: Suggestions that Russians tried to help Trump are “lies”

From July 24, 2016 on CNN's “State of the Union”:

JAKE TAPPER: So, I don't know if you were hearing earlier, but Robby Mook, the campaign manager for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — I asked him about the DNC leak. And he suggested that experts are saying that Russians were behind both the leak — the hacking of the DNC emails and their release. He seemed to be suggesting that this is part of a plot to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton. Your response?

TRUMP JR.: Well, it just goes to show you their exact moral compass. I mean, they will say anything to be able to win this. I mean, this is time and time again, lie after lie. You notice he won't say, well, I say this. We hear experts. You know, here's (INAUDIBLE) at home once said that this is what's happening with the Russians. It's disgusting. It's so phony. I watched him bumble through the interview, I was able to hear it on audio a little bit. I mean, I can't think of bigger lies, but that exactly goes to show you what the DNC and what the Clinton camp will do. They will lie and do anything to win.

Upshot: The intelligence community, of course, later determined that Mook was right that the Russians hacked to help Trump. What's notable here is that Trump Jr. vociferously denied the Russians were trying to help Trump — just a month after meeting with a Russian who promised damaging information on Clinton.
Click to expand...
*TL;DR Trump Jr. can't keep all his 'alternative facts' straight.
 
Freeloading Rusty

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
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Donald Trump Jr. is digging himself a deep legal hole
In June 2016, as the general election campaign kicking into high gear, Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian attorney named Natalia Veselnitskaya. The goal, as he expressly admitted in a statement issued on Sunday, was to attempt to acquire useful information on Hillary Clinton.


“I was asked to have a meeting ... with an individual who I was told might have information helpful to the campaign,” Trump Jr. said. “After pleasantries were exchanged, the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton.”

Trump Jr.’s defense was that the meeting didn’t actually end up bearing fruit: His statement says that “it quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.” In other words, there’s no way this constituted meaningful collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, because Veselnitskaya didn’t provide him with anything useful.

But experts on national security and election law say there’s a good case that this “defense” is, legally speaking, no defense at all.


Trump Jr.’s decision to meet with the Russian attorney to see what information she might have, they say, may well have violated campaign finance law. You don’t have to actually get useful help from foreigners, according to this law: The mere fact that Trump Jr. asked for information from a Russian national about Clinton, and heard her out as she attempted to describe it, might have constituted a federal crime.


“If what Donald Trump Jr. said was true ... then they should have never had the meeting in the first place,” Nick Akerman, an assistant special prosecutor during the Watergate investigation who now specializes in data crime, says.

In short? Donald Trump Jr.’s statement defending himself may well constitute a confession of guilt.


“The most important legal issue raised by these revelations actually goes to the question where collusion might be criminal under campaign finance law,” says Ryan Goodman, a former Defense Department special counsel and current editor of the legal site Just Security. “Even if the meeting didn’t produce anything ... solicitation itself is the offense.”

Why Trump Jr. may have broken the law
The statute in question is 52 USC 30121, 36 USC 510 — the law governing foreign contributions to US campaigns. There are two key passages that apply here. This is the first:

A foreign national shall not, directly or indirectly, make a contribution or a donation of money or other thing of value, or expressly or impliedly promise to make a contribution or a donation, in connection with any Federal, State, or local election.


The crucial phrase here is “other thing of value,” legal experts tell me. It means that the law extends beyond just cash donations. Foreigners are also banned from providing other kinds of contributions that would be the functional equivalent of a campaign donation, just provided in the form of services rather than goods. Like, say, information about Hillary Clinton’s alleged ties to Russia.

“To the extent you’re using the resources of a foreign country to run your campaign — that’s an illegal campaign contribution,” Akerman explains.

Here’s the second important passage of the statute: “No person shall knowingly solicit, accept, or receive from a foreign national any contribution or donation prohibited by [this law].”

The key word from Trump Jr., according to University of Wisconsin election law expert Rick Hasen, is “solicit,” which has a very specific meaning in this context. To quote the relevant statute:

A solicitation is an oral or written communication that, construed as reasonably understood in the context in which it is made, contains a clear message asking, requesting, or recommending that another person make a contribution, donation, transfer of funds, or otherwise provide anything of value.

In short? If Trump Jr. asked Veselnitskaya, in person, to provide “anything of value” on Clinton, then there’s a real case that he illegally solicited a campaign contribution from a foreign national. Given that political campaigns regularly pay thousands of dollars to opposition researchers to dig up dirt, it seems like damaging information on Clinton would constitute something “of value” to the Trump campaign.


The solicitation bit is why it doesn’t matter if Trump Jr. actually got useful information. The part that’s illegal, according to the experts I spoke to, is trying to acquire dirt on Clinton, not successfully acquiring it. And his statement more or less admits that he did, in fact, solicit this information.

“The most recent [developments] are especially significant because they include specific statements on the record conceding the Trump campaign’s expressed interest in what the Russians could provide,” Bob Bauer, White House counsel for Barack Obama from 2010 to 2011, writes at Just Security. “Those statements show intent — a clear-cut willingness to have Russian support — and they reveal specific actions undertaken to obtain it.”

Trump appears to have recognized some danger. On Monday afternoon, he hired a lawyer, Alan Futerfas, to represent him on issues relating to the Russia investigation. So far, Futerfas has not responded to a request for comment.

The key issue: whether he knew he was meeting with a Russian
In order to actually nail Donald Trump Jr. on solicitation charges, experts say, prosecutors need to be able to show that he knew the person he was meeting with was a foreign national. If Trump Jr. believed that Veselnitskaya was American when he requested information from her, then he would not have been soliciting information from the Russians.

Trump Jr.’s statement gives him a tiny bit of wiggle room on this point. In it, he says: “I was not told her name prior to the meeting,” implying that he didn’t know much about the person he was meeting — perhaps including, among other things, her nationality.

According to Goodman, the former Defense Department special counsel, this line is the one thing that keeps Trump Jr.’s statement from being a clear-cut confession of having violated the law. But Goodman is skeptical that Trump Jr. really knew nothing about a person he was meeting on such a sensitive subject


“I think it would turn on the fact of whether he knew he was going to be meeting with a Russian national. And I don’t think it’s plausible that he did not know ahead of time,” Goodman says.

But even if we stipulate that Trump Jr. didn’t know anything about the person he was supposed to meet until they sat down, he’s still not off the hook. He would need to show that he was still unaware of her nationality when he asked for information about Clinton during the meeting. By his own account, “pleasantries were exchanged” before they started talking about Clinton and Russia, which makes it hard to believe that Trump Jr. wasn’t aware of her nationality.

“Apparently, when she came in and introduced herself, the Trump campaign team was still uninformed about her identity and did not ask about it,” Bauer writes. “Suffice it to say that this is a strange account and investigators will probe it deeply.”

The key point here, for those of you following along at home, is that Trump Jr.’s statement has put him in a very precarious place. If Bauer, Goodman, and Hasen are reading the statute correctly, then Trump Jr. has now openly admitted damaging facts that prosecutors would otherwise need to prove to make a case against him.

“I’d want to get everyone who was involved in that meeting in front of a grand jury, and find out what they say about what happened there,” Akerman, the former Watergate prosecutor, said when asked what he’d do in light of the recent news.
Click to expand...
 
Freeloading Rusty

Freeloading Rusty

Here comes Rover, sniffin’ at your ass
Jan 11, 2016
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Trump Jr. Was Told in Email of Russian Effort to Aid Campaign

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.

There is no evidence to suggest that the promised damaging information was related to Russian government computer hacking that led to the release of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails. The meeting took place less than a week before it was widely reported that Russian hackers had infiltrated the committee’s servers.

But the email is likely to be of keen interest to the Justice Department and congressional investigators, who are examining whether any of President Trump’s associates colluded with the Russian government to disrupt last year’s election. American intelligence agencies have determined that the Russian government tried to sway the election in favor of Mr. Trump.

The Times first reported on the existence of the meeting on Saturday, and a fuller picture has emerged in subsequent days.

Alan Futerfas, the lawyer for the younger Mr. Trump, said his client had done nothing wrong but pledged to work with investigators if contacted.

“In my view, this is much ado about nothing. During this busy period, Robert Goldstone contacted Don Jr. in an email and suggested that people had information concerning alleged wrongdoing by Democratic Party front-runner, Hillary Clinton, in her dealings with Russia,” he told The Times in an email on Monday. “Don Jr.’s takeaway from this communication was that someone had information potentially helpful to the campaign and it was coming from someone he knew. Don Jr. had no knowledge as to what specific information, if any, would be discussed.”

It is unclear whether Mr. Goldstone had direct knowledge of the origin of the damaging material. One person who was briefed on the emails said it appeared that he was passing along information that had been passed through several others.

Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, and Paul J. Manafort, the campaign chairman at the time, also attended the June 2016 meeting in New York. Representatives for Mr. Kushner referred requests for comments back to an earlier statement, which said he had voluntarily disclosed the meeting to the federal government. He has deferred questions on the content of the meeting to Donald Trump Jr.

A spokesman for Mr. Manafort declined to comment.

But at the White House, the deputy press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was adamant from the briefing room lectern that “the president’s campaign did not collude in any way. Don Jr. did not collude with anybody to influence the election. No one within the Trump campaign colluded in order to influence the election.”

The president, a prolific Twitter user, did not address his son’s controversy on Monday, and instead sought to highlight other issues throughout the morning.

In a series of tweets, the president’s son insisted he had done what anyone connected to a political campaign would have done — hear out potentially damaging information about an opponent. He maintained that his various statements about the meeting were not in conflict.

“Obviously I’m the first person on a campaign to ever take a meeting to hear info about an opponent... went nowhere but had to listen,” he wrote in one tweet. In another, he added, “No inconsistency in statements, meeting ended up being primarily about adoptions. In response to further Q’s I simply provided more details.”

The younger Mr. Trump, who had a reputation during the campaign for having meetings with a wide range of people eager to speak to him, did not join his father’s administration. He runs the family business, the Trump Organization, with his brother Eric.

On Monday, after news reports that he had hired a lawyer, he indicated in a tweet that he would be open to speaking to the Senate Intelligence Committee, one of the congressional panels investigating Russian meddling in the election. “Happy to work with the committee to pass on what I know,” the younger Mr. Trump wrote.

Mr. Goldstone represents the Russian pop star Emin Agalarov, whose father was President Trump’s business partner in bringing the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in 2013. In an interview Monday, Mr. Goldstone said he was asked by Mr. Agalarov to set up the meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya.

“He said, ‘I’m told she has information about illegal campaign contributions to the D.N.C.,’” Mr. Goldstone recalled, referring to the Democratic National Committee. He said he then emailed Donald Trump Jr., outlining what the lawyer purported to have.

But Mr. Goldstone, who wrote the email over a year ago, denied any knowledge of involvement by the Russian government in the matter, saying that never dawned on him. “Never, never ever,” he said. Later, after the email was described to The Times, efforts to reach him for further comment were unsuccessful.

In the interview, he said it was his understanding that Ms. Veselnitskaya was simply a “private citizen” for whom Mr. Agalarov wanted to do a favor. He also said he did not know whether Mr. Agalarov’s father, Aras Agalarov, a Moscow real estate tycoon known to be close to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, was involved. The elder Mr. Agalarov and the younger Mr. Trump worked together to bring a Trump Tower to Moscow, but the project never got off the ground.

Mr. Goldstone also said his recollection of the meeting largely tracked with the account given by the president’s son, as outlined in the Sunday statement Mr. Trump issued in response to a Times article on the June 2016 meeting. Mr. Goldstone said the last time he had communicated with the younger Mr. Trump was to send him a congratulatory text after the November election, but he added that he did speak to the Trump Organization over the past weekend, before giving his account to the news media.

Donald Trump Jr., who initially told The Times that Ms. Veselnitskaya wanted to talk about the resumption of adoption of Russian children by American families, acknowledged in the Sunday statement that one subject of the meeting was possibly compromising information about Mrs. Clinton. His decision to move ahead with such a meeting was unusual for a political campaign, but it was consistent with the haphazard approach the Trump operation, and the White House, have taken in vetting people they deal with ahead of time.

But he said that the Russian lawyer produced nothing of consequence, and that the meeting ended after she began talking about the Magnitsky Act — an American law that blacklists Russians suspected of human rights abuses. The 2012 law so enraged Mr. Putin that he halted American adoptions of Russian children.

Mr. Goldstone said Ms. Veselnitskaya offered “just a vague, generic statement about the campaign’s funding and how people, including Russian people, living all over the world donate when they shouldn’t donate” before turning to her anti-Magnitsky Act arguments.

“It was the most inane nonsense I’ve ever heard,” he said. “And I was actually feeling agitated by it. Had I, you know, actually taken up what is a huge amount of their busy time with this nonsense?”

Ms. Veselnitskaya, for her part, denied that the campaign or compromising material about Mrs. Clinton ever came up. She said she had never acted on behalf of the Russian government. A representative for Mr. Putin said on Monday that he did not know Ms. Veselnitskaya, and that he had no knowledge of the June 2016 meeting.

Ms. Sanders said at a news briefing that the American president had learned of the meeting recently, but she declined to discuss details.

The White House press office, however, accused Mrs. Clinton’s team of hypocrisy. The office circulated a January 2017 article published in Politico, detailing how officials from the Ukrainian government tried to help the Democratic candidate conduct opposition research on Mr. Trump and some of his aides.

News of the meeting involving the younger Mr. Trump, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Manafort blunted whatever good feeling the president’s team had after his trip to Europe for the Group of 20 economic summit meeting.

The president learned from his aides about the 2016 meeting at the end of the trip, according to a White House official. But some people in the White House had known for several days that it had occurred, because Mr. Kushner had revised his foreign contact disclosure document to include it.

The president was frustrated by the news of the meeting, according to a person close to him — less over the fact that it had happened, and more because it was yet another story about Russia that had swamped the news cycle.
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Trump silent as son walloped in Russia scandal
President Donald Trump has been conspicuously silent about the growing firestorm involving his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who is facing more revelations about a meeting he held during the height of the campaign with a Russian lawyer promising damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

Trump has kept a light schedule since returning from the G-20 summit in Germany on Saturday, making no public appearances. He’s been active on Twitter, but his messages have ranged from railing against Democrats to bringing the Olympics to Los Angeles to defending his daughter Ivanka’s role at the G-20. But there have been no tweets about Trump Jr.

And on Monday night, as The New York Times dropped another harmful report about Trump’s eldest son — alleging that he was informed by email that the Clinton information was part of a Russian government effort to help his father — the president’s legal team just reiterated that Trump himself was not a part of it.

“The President was not aware of and did not attend the meeting,” said Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Trump’s legal team.

Trump Jr., who has hired New York criminal defense attorney Alan Futerfas as his personal attorney for Russia-related matters, took to Twitter to defend himself on Tuesday morning. “Media & Dems are extremely invested in the Russia story. If this nonsense meeting is all they have after a yr, I understand the desperation!” he wrote.

The president’s own silence is deepening the mystery around the latest twist in the long-running Russia scandal that has proved to be at the least a major distraction for the Trump White House and could pose a significant threat to his overall presidency.
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Donald Trump's Team Keeps Changing Their Russia Stories
Just days after his father secured the Republican nomination, Donald Trump Jr. appeared on CNN to rebut what had become a frequent charge of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign— Russians were seeking to help his father’s presidential campaign. "It's disgusting. It's so phony,” the younger Trump said on July 24, 2016.

But the younger Trump has since admitted that he was not saying everything he knew at the time. Weeks earlier, Trump had met with a Russian lawyer with ties to Kremlin, Natalia Veselnitskaya, who had promised she “might have information helpful to the campaign,” according to a statement released Monday by the younger Trump's attorney, Alan Futerfas. The New York Timesreported hours later that Trump Jr. was told in an email that the Russian government was the source of the information Veselnitskaya would present.


The new revelations fit a pattern that has dogged President Donald Trump and his aides through the first months of their administration. Time and again, those close to the President, and the President himself, have had to change their stories about their proximity to Russian officials during the election campaign and shortly afterwards, as new contradictory information comes to light.

"Did I meet with people that were Russian? I’m sure, I’m sure I did,” Donald Trump Jr. told the Times in March. “But none that were set up. None that I can think of at the moment. And certainly none that I was representing the campaign in any way, shape or form.” He now says he invited both the campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and another top campaign aide, Jared Kushner, to sit in on the meeting with Veselnitskaya knowing they would discuss information about the Clinton campaign.

This directly contradicts the claims of several senior Trump aides that this sort of contact never took place. "There was no communication between the campaign and any foreign entity during the campaign," said Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks shortly after the November election last year. "Of course not. Why would there be any contacts?" said Vice President Mike Pence on January 15, when asked on Fox News if there were any contacts between "Trump or his associates and the Kremlin or cutouts."
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we're becoming as insane at Europe Manchester domestic violence case dropped for 'cultural incompetence' | New Hampshire

MANCHESTER - A Congolese immigrant escaped prosecution on six domestic-violence crimes when his lawyer convinced a city prosecutor that he lacked the cultural competency to participate in the American justice system, according to court and public records reviewed by the New Hampshire Union Leader.

The decision is one of several questionable actions highlighted late last month by Attorney General Gordon MacDonald in a widespread critique of domestic-violence prosecutions in Manchester. MacDonald's critique led to the abrupt retirement of veteran City Solicitor Tom Clark and has put Clark's office under heightened scrutiny.
 
Freeloading Rusty

Freeloading Rusty

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How Republicans In Congress Have Reacted To Donald Trump Jr.'s Email Release
South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham told reporters Trump Jr. "definitely has to testify"
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View: https://twitter.com/JenniferJJacobs/status/884444783351083008


View: https://twitter.com/JenniferJJacobs/status/884817497475739648


View: https://twitter.com/jbendery/status/884821553757773825


View: https://twitter.com/leezeldin/status/884825699865034753


View: https://twitter.com/ericawerner/status/884809813691117568


View: https://twitter.com/MattLaslo/status/884812598201470976
 
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