Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

[zaratustra]

Proto-Nazis?

[Thad]

Original Recipe Nazis.

[Büge]

There must be a German compound word for this.

[Thad]

Press reports that Don Jr met with Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer during the campaign.

Jr says "Yeah but it was about adoption policy."

Press reports that it was definitely after the lawyer claimed to have dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Jr responds with, variously, "Yeah, but it turns out she didn't," "Hey, everybody does it," and "No, this doesn't contradict my previous story at all!"

I definitely get the argument that the press is focusing too much on the Russia story to the detriment of other important issues like healthcare, the environment, immigration -- Christ, there are a LOT of fires right now. But man, it's hard to blame them for all the Russia coverage when there's new information like this coming out all the damn time.

[Brantly B.]

So did he adopt a kid? Is he going to adopt a kid? Is the kid from Russia? If not, why did he need to speak to a Russian lawyer about it? If so, when do we get to see the kid's birth certificate, to prove that the kid was born in Russia?

If we can't prove that Donald Jr. adopted a kid born in Russia then I'm going to tell everybody constantly that he adopted a Muslim kid from Kenya.

[Thad]

And why won't he show us his e-mails? What's he hiding?

[Mongrel]

[Smiler]

And why won't he show us his e-mails? What's he hiding?

[Smiler]

[Mongrel]

Here's the hottest page:

[Sharkey]

On one hand, the Times already had these emails and Butthead just vomiting them up kinda-sorta resembles transparency and a nothing-to-hide attitude, which would probably carry more weight if the contents weren't utterly damning. On the other, this robs them of the Fake News thing if the Times had released this themselves. It's like pointing out that someone has shat themselves and their response is to dig out a handful and smear it on their face, because nobody who shat themselves would do that.

[Thad]

The Post has annotations.

Things Jr told the truth about: he really didn't know the name of the woman he was meeting with.

Things he lied about: he was very definitely told that the meeting was about information that was damaging to Hillary Clinton, that he was meeting with a representative of the Russian government, and the Russian government supported Trump Sr. And when he emailed Manafort and Kushner, he referred explicitly to Clinton and Russia.

Other thoughts: if there's any good news here for Trump Sr, it's that these emails suggest Jr and co intentionally kept him out of the loop. (Always maintain plausible deniability and have someone else set up to take the fall. I am familiar with this tactic from years of watching Joe Arpaio (last seen trying to wriggle out of criminal contempt charges by blaming his former lawyer) -- though AFAIK even he was never cold enough to use his own son as the fall guy.) The White House's insistence that this is the first Sr is hearing about this is plausible, for now, though as the Post notes, he was making some suggestions at the time that he was about to get some new dirt on Clinton.

[Mothra]

[Mongrel]

Propublica: Trump Lawyer Marc Kasowitz Threatens Stranger in Emails: ‘Watch Your Back, Bitch’

This reads exactly like an Onion article.

[Mongrel]

By now you've probably seen in the news that there was a Totally-Not-Ex-Russian-Itelligence Agent Lobbyist, Rinat Akhmetshin, present at the Don Jr. meeting, not to mention a Russian translator (!) and who knows who else. This meeting is turning into a veritable clown car.

Akhmetshin has now added a new revelation:

In his first public interview about the meeting, Akhmetshin said he accompanied Veselnitskaya to Trump Tower where they met an interpreter who participated in the meeting. He said he had learned about the meeting only that day when Veselnitskaya asked him to attend. He said he showed up in jeans and a T-shirt.

During the meeting, Akhmetshin said Veselnitskaya brought with her a plastic folder with printed-out documents that detailed what she believed was the flow of illicit funds to the Democratic National Committee. Veselnitskaya presented the contents of the documents to the Trump associates and suggested that making the information public could help the Trump campaign, he said.

“This could be a good issue to expose how the DNC is accepting bad money,” Akhmetshin recalled her saying.

This is just Putin trying to burn Trump and the US to the ground now, right? Like just sow chaos and let disasters follow? I mean, once he figured he can't effectively manipulate a crazed egomaniacal moron with the intellect of a five year old, Putin shrugged and shifted to just doing as much damage as possible, right?

[Brantly B.]

Why do it on purpose when it will inevitably happen by your inaction?

[Mongrel]

Why do it on purpose when it will inevitably happen by your inaction?

So you can cackle in your villain lair.

[Mongrel]

[Mongrel]

Sadly it's in Twitter thread format (FUCK), but this is a good summary of just how ridiculous the Trump claims are when considering the events that followed the DTJr/Russia meeting. I have here (very slightly) edited it into an actual coherent article.

So here is what we are currently being asked to believe.

A Putin-aligned Russian oligarch and his son cultivate a personal/professional relationship w/ Trump and his family over several years. When Trump becomes the nominee, said oligarch uses trusted intermediary to tell Trump Jr there's a Russain gov effort to elect Trump, and that as part of that effort they have damaging info on Hillary to share.

They set up a meeting to collaborate on this project. Trump's son, his campaign chair and son in law attend a meeting w/ a person called a "Russian government lawyer" to obtain the dirt; everyone shows up at the meeting and...the lawyer just talked about adoption and the Magnitsky act! After all that, it's a dud.

Then, and here's the crucial part, NO ONE DOES ANYTHING ELSE. The oligarch and son don't make further contact. Trump & Co don't use the active line of communication thru Goldstone to say "hey what the hell was that about?" Everyone just drops it! Both Trump's campaign and the Putin-allied oligarch never take another single step to further a collaboration they'd both agreed to!

Only - oh by the way - the Russian government *is actually* engaged in a brazen, sophisticated effort to get Trump elected, and as that becomes public just 5 weeks later, no one at Trump Tower gets curious. No one reaches back out. No one calls Emin. No one emails Goldstone about this topic ever again. No one brings it up ever again. No one ever tells Trump "Aras and Emin said the Russian government wants to try to get you elected, but then we had this weird meeting". No one ever raises it when they see DNC hacks & Wikileaks. Everyone just forgets about that crazy time, when dad's Russian contacts reached out to join forces with the Russian government to defeat Hillary. That's it, That's the end of the story.

I don't have the words to express how implausible that version of events is, but it's what the WH is currently telling us happened.

Source:

[Thad]

My go-to with my conservative relatives since the Bush Administration has been, "Imagine Hillary Clinton was President, but everything else was exactly the same. Would you believe Hillary Clinton had done something wrong?"

The subject hasn't actually come up in the past year; I have desperately avoided bringing up politics around those relatives, and, tellingly, they don't seem to be in any hurry to bring it up either. I was in a room full of them last night for several hours and there was not one mention of politics or current events.

But if there had been, yeah, first thing I'd have said is, "If you heard the exact same story but it was about Chelsea Clinton instead of Donald Trump Jr, would you believe her story?"