The meeting, the Trump team has claimed, was a bust. There was no useful derogatory information. But by this point, the Russians had already stolen tens of thousands of emails and documents from Democratic targets and were, no doubt, pondering what to do with the swiped material. This meeting was another signal conveyed to Moscow: the Trump crew didn't mind Russian meddling in the election and was even willing to covertly collaborate with Russia on dirty tricks.
Thus, Trump's top men were encouraging a repressive regime to clandestinely intervene in American politics. And when this meeting was revealed, long after the election, Trump concocted a false cover story for Trump Jr. to issue: this get-together had been nothing more than a conversation about the issue of adoption in Russia. Why did they lie? It seems obvious: to cover up significant misconduct.
The Hacked EmailsTrump's collusion with Putin's office regarding his secret Moscow deal and the Trump advisers attempt to collude with a secret Russian scheme to help their campaign were not directly related to the hack-and-dump operation mounted by Russia that targeted the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign. Yet when that attack happened, the Trump camp did openly assist the Kremlin by denying this assault was underway.
After more than 20,000 emails and documents stolen by Russian hackers were released by WikiLeaks at the start of the Democrats' presidential convention in July 2016, the Clinton campaign pushed the point that its candidate -- and the American election -- was being assaulted by Moscow. In response, Trump Jr. and Manafort publicly proclaimed this was nonsense and a lie being promoted by the Clintonites for political gain. (A month earlier, when the Democratic Party revealed it had been hacked by Russia, the Trump campaign accused them of cooking up a hoax.)
If anyone had reason to believe the Russians were behind an operation seeking to disrupt the Democratic convention, it was Trump Jr. and Manafort. With the Trump Tower meeting the previous month, they had been informed Moscow was aiming to intervene in the election to harm Clinton and help Trump. And the Russians were presumably aware that Trump's inner circle knew this. With their false denials, Trump Jr. and Manafort were assisting the Moscow cover-up. (The Russian government was claiming it had nothing to do with the hack-and-dump operation.) How else could the Russians interpret the actions of the Trump campaign other than as further encouragement and a sign of approval?
Not to mention that, at this time, Trump himself publicly called on Russia to keep hacking: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 [Clinton] emails that are missing." That night, according to a Mueller indictment, Russian hackers for the first time tried to penetrate Clinton's personal email. They knew to take a hint.
By echoing Russian disinformation -- after being informed the Kremlin intended to mess with the presidential campaign to assist Trump -- the Trump campaign was making it easier for a foreign power to undermine a US election.
The ColludersAnd there's more: as this attack proceeded, the Trump campaign kept trying to secretly engage with Russia and Russian interests. The Mueller indictment of George Papadopoulos -- the Trump campaign foreign policy adviser who met with various Russian cut-outs and who was told that Moscow had dirt on Clinton in the form of thousands of purloined emails -- noted that during the summer 2016 he was trying to establish a back-channel connection between the campaign and Putin's office. And Papadopoulos was doing this with the approval of senior campaign aides. Here was another clear signal to the Kremlin: Trump and his team had no problem with the Russian attack on the election and still desired a secret hook-up with Moscow. There was no need for Trump to conspire directly with Putin. He and his campaign were repeatedly flashing a green light at Moscow and aiding the Russian cover-up.
Manafort, though, was directly conspiring -- with Russians, including a Russian oligarch. On August 2, Manafort took time away from his duties as Trump's campaign manager to meet at a ritzy cigar bar in Manhattan with Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime Ukrainian-Russian business colleague who, according to several Mueller court filings, has been assessed by the FBI to be an associate of Russian intelligence.
Though much of the details about this meeting have been redacted in the relevant court filings, it seems that the rendezvous was arranged at the behest of Oleg Deripaska, a Putin-friendly Russian oligarch. At this get-together, Manafort supplied Kilimnik polling data from the campaign. (Kilimnik, according to the New York Times, subsequently passed this information to two Ukrainian oligarchs, and it's unclear if he shared it with others.)
At this meeting, the two discussed a supposed peace plan for Ukraine that would benefit Russia. And what's known about the meeting suggests that Manafort was signaling to the Russians that the Trump campaign was amenable to a policy that would lift the harsh economic sanctions imposed on Russia.
This meeting was occurring at a time when cyber-security experts and American intelligence officials were being cited in news reports saying Russia was behind the cyber-warfare being waged against Democratic targets. Any private sign from Manafort that Trump was indeed keen to remove the sanctions -- a position that Trump had publicly demonstrated sympathy for -- would provide more encouragement for the Russians. (A week or so before this meeting, Manafort had declared he had no connections with Russians, which was a lie: throughout the campaign he used Kilimnik to communicate with Deripaska, with whom he had done business for a decade.)
Hobnobbing with the enemy, lying about it, and bolstering Moscow's cover-up. Then Trump took it up a notch.
In mid-August, as the official GOP nominee, Trump received a classified intelligence briefing that included the intelligence community's assessment that Moscow was the perp in the hack-and-dump operation. Yet for the rest of the campaign, Trump repeatedly downplayed or denied Russian involvement. He did this in public statements and at the debates.
This stance turned Putin's attack into a political dispute. Top Republicans (and Trump-cheering pundits in the media) generally followed his lead and declined to rally against the Russian assault. This prevented the coalescing of a focused national response to Putin's war on the election.
That helped the Russians. Perhaps it emboldened them. On October 7, 2016, the Obama administration released a statement declaring Moscow culpable for the cyber-attacks on the Democrats. An hour or so later, the Access Hollywood video of Trump boasting of sexually assaulting women appeared. And shortly after that, WikiLeaks began releasing the personal emails of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta that were stolen by Russian operatives. For weeks, WikiLeaks dumped a new tranche of Podesta emails on practically a daily basis and hobbled the Clinton campaign in the final stretch of the race.
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