Russiagate update: Is Trump buying loyalty?
Not even the weekend could stop the coverage of the Trump-Russia scandals.
- AP fills in a big detail surrounding both the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between the Trump campaign and Russian agents and a 2017 meeting in Moscow:
Earlier this year, a Russian-American lobbyist and another businessman discussed over coffee in Moscow an extraordinary meeting they had attended 12 months earlier: a gathering at Trump Tower with President Donald Trump’s son, his son-in-law and his then-campaign chairman.
The Moscow meeting in June, which has not been previously disclosed, is now under scrutiny by investigators who want to know why the two men met in the first place and whether there was some effort to get their stories straight about the Trump Tower meeting just weeks before it would become public, The Associated Press has learned.
Congressional investigators have questioned both men — lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin and Ike Kaveladze, a business associate of a Moscow-based developer and former Trump business partner — and obtained their text message communications, people familiar with the investigation told the AP.
Twitter user @AliasVaughn has a useful analysis of the full story in this Twitther thread (click the link to see the entire thread).
1. Thought this was gonna be a slow news day? THINK AGAIN. @AP has this exclusive on the Trump tower Russian lawyer meeting with Jr. https://t.co/gesO0mrVyS
— Ale (@aliasvaughn) November 18, 2017
- By funding a defense fund for his West Wing aides, Newsweek‘s Summer Meza explains how Donald Trump is arguably buying influence — and false testimony.
- Ah, Paris! The ideal city for romance, culture, and a lunch meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Moscow-linked couple that stinks to high heaven (it must have been on the up-and-up — after all, the couple did brief Moscow).
- Harry Litman’s thoroughgoing analysis of where Robert Mueller’s probe stands now at the LA Times is definitely worth your while.
- A better title for this article would have been “RNC Stops Paying Trump Legal Bills Because They Know He’s Deep in the Russian Brown Sauce”.
Keep your seat belts fastened — we predict some seriously bumpy road ahead!
