![]() The fact that it was neither money nor hard assets, but just information, does not prevent Congress and the Federal Election Commission (FEC) from making its exchange a felony. Opposition research is a “thing of value” under the campaign finance laws. The whole futile exercise took 20 minutes - enough to give Putin a card to play on Trump (if you meet with the Kremlin, you’re at the Kremlin’s mercy when Russia decides to spin what the meeting was about), but not for much else. After her presentation predictably fizzled, Veselnitskaya proceeded to her real agenda: using the meeting to lobby the Trump campaign against the Magnitisky Act - a bane of Vladimir Putin’s existence that allows Russian assets to be frozen in retaliation for the torture-murder of an investigator who uncovered a massive financial fraud orchestrated by the regime. The promised information turned out to be useless: claims that financial backers of the Democratic Party made money from crimes in Russia. A Kremlin-tied lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, was promptly dispatched from Moscow to Trump Tower where, along with her retinue, she was given a meeting with Trump Jr., along with two other top campaign officials (then-chairman Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, the now-president’s son-in-law). The offer was said to reflect the Putin regime’s support for Trump’s candidacy. offering what was hyped as devastatingly information that would incriminate Hillary Clinton. Through a publicist intermediary, a Kremlin-connected Russian oligarch, Aras Agalarov, reached out to Don Jr. Because if special counsel Robert Mueller is right, then there ought to be another withering two-year investigation, tout de suite, of the Hillary Clinton campaign’s far worse election-law violations. That’s what I had to tell myself, more than once, in reading the Mueller report’s analysis of the closest thing to “Trump-Russia collusion” in the 2016 campaign - the now-infamous Trump Tower meeting of June 9, 2016. ![]() Our worst vindictive instincts can undermine our most cherished liberties. Tit-for-tat is the worst instinct in politics. ![]()
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