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Official Russian Election Interference Thread

more like bernie...

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WFFaithful said:
Trump dictated son’s misleading statement on meeting with Russian lawyer

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...4c94f96-73ae-11e7-8f39-eeb7d3a2d304_story.htm
Click to expand...

It's almost like he's trying to put himself in legal jeapordy. This isn't fucking rocket science.


"Trump, they say, is increasingly acting as his own lawyer, strategist and publicist, often disregarding the recommendations of the professionals he has hired.

“He refuses to sit still,” the presidential adviser said. “He doesn’t think he’s in any legal jeopardy, so he really views this as a political problem he is going to solve by himself.”
 
"The thing that really strikes me about this is the stupidity of involving the president,” Zeidenberg said. “They are still treating this like a family-run business and they have a PR problem. . . . What they don’t seem to understand is this is a criminal investigation involving all of them.”
 
During breaks away from the summit, Kushner and Ivanka Trump gathered with Hicks and Raffel to discuss Kushner’s response to the inquiry, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. Kushner’s legal team joined at times by phone.

Hicks also spoke by phone with Trump Jr. Again, say people familiar with the conversations, Kushner’s team concluded that the best strategy would be to err on the side of transparency, because they believed the complete story would eventually emerge.

The discussions among the president’s advisers consumed much of the day, and they continued as they prepared to board Air Force One that evening for the flight home.

But before everyone boarded the plane, Trump had overruled the consensus, according to people with knowledge of the events.

It remains unclear exactly how much the president knew at the time of the flight about Trump Jr.’s meeting.

The president directed that Trump Jr.’s statement to the Times describe the meeting as unimportant. He wanted the statement to say that the meeting had been initiated by the Russian lawyer and primarily was about her pet issue — the adoption of Russian children.

Air Force One took off from Germany shortly after 6 p.m. — about noon in Washington. In a forward cabin, Trump was busy working on his son’s statement, according to people with knowledge of events. The president dictated the statement to Hicks, who served as a go-between with Trump Jr., who was not on the plane, sharing edits between the two men, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

In the early afternoon, Eastern time, Trump Jr.’s team put out the statement to the Times. It was four sentences long, describing the encounter as a “short, introductory meeting.”

“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,” the statement read.

Trump Jr. went on to say: “I was asked to attend the meeting by an acquaintance, but was not told the name of the person I would be meeting with beforehand.”
 
Trump's legal team is denying the story but ABC has two senior sources confirming it.
 
Elements of conspiracy:

  1. There was an agreement between two or more persons to commit at least one crime;
  2. The defendant became a member of the conspiracy knowing of at least one of its objects and intending to help accomplish it;
  3. One of the members of the conspiracy performed at least one overt act for the purpose of carrying out the conspiracy.

I'm barely a 2L, but there's something there with conspiracy. The crime would easily be election fraud. This report that has been confirmed by multiple sources show that Trump knew about the meeting at the very least, and allowing his senior campaign staff to take part in it could be enough to show intent to forward it. Dictating a statement that was deliberately misleading or false could be enough to meet the overt act requirement.

It's obviously not a slam dunk, and there are definitely defenses that Trump and his team will use, but showing that Trump at the very least lied about the meeting and forced his surrogates to lie as well is a huge step toward getting into the criminal conversation. Still a long way before anything concrete comes out, but at the rate that this White House fucks up, we might have another smoking gun by September.
 
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