Fredo Trump and the Culture of Dishonesty

Source: The New York Times
Published: Jul 11, 2017
Author: Editorial Board
Post Date: 2017-07-11 13:47:08 by Willie Green
Views: 2527

At a critical juncture in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign last year, his son Donald Trump Jr. met with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer who promised to share political dirt on Hillary Clinton. Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman at the time, and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and a key strategist, also attended.

The June 9, 2016, meeting is of obvious interest to Robert Mueller III, the Justice Department special counsel investigating the Trump team’s potential involvement in Russia’s effort to influence the presidential election. In two clumsy statements over the weekend, the younger Mr. Trump on Saturday said the meeting was related to Russia’s freezing of an adoption program popular with Americans. When confronted a day later with a Times story citing authoritative sources that Ms. Veselnitskaya had promised damaging material on Mrs. Clinton, he said that the information she supplied was essentially meaningless and merely a “pretext” for discussing the adoption issue.

On the face of it, this seemed a clear though perhaps unintended admission by Donald Trump Jr. that he had gone into the meeting expecting damaging information, and the episode is clearly grist for Mr. Mueller’s mill. As is a report Monday night by The Times that the president’s son had received an email saying Ms. Veselnitskaya’s information came from Moscow. But his shifty statements are also further evidence of how freely his father and the people around the president contort the truth. Only six months in, President Trump has compiled a record of dishonesty — ranging from casual misstatements to flat-out lies — without precedent in the modern presidency. Equally disheartening is his team’s willingness to share in his mendacity.

On Sunday, before Donald Trump Jr. acknowledged that there was a Clinton-related aspect to the meeting, Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, was on Fox News suggesting that the Veselnitskaya episode was “a big nothingburger” for the Trump campaign.

If a culture of dishonesty takes root in an administration, how can Americans believe anything its officials say? Take, for instance, the matter of whether President Vladimir Putin of Russia personally directed Moscow’s hacking of the 2016 presidential election. In statements dating from his first days in office until the eve of his meeting with Mr. Putin in Germany last week, when he said “nobody really knows,” Mr. Trump has deflected and sought to discredit his own intelligence agencies’ finding that Moscow, at Mr. Putin’s direction, tried to disrupt the election to help him win. Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, said after the American and Russian presidents met in Hamburg that they “had a very robust and lengthy exchange on the subject” and that Mr. Trump had “pressed” Mr. Putin on the issue. Later, Mr. Trump made much the same claim on Twitter. The Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, had quite a different version of the facts, suggesting that Mr. Trump had characterized the hacking controversy as a “campaign” against Russia in which “not a single fact has been produced.” So whom should Americans believe? In a more credible administration, who would ever ask?

On Monday, Donald Trump Jr. hired a lawyer, while maintaining on Twitter that he’d been forthright in answering questions about the meeting last year. Meanwhile, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, deputy press secretary, blew more smoke: The “only thing I see inappropriate” about the meeting, she said, is that it was leaked to the media.

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#1: BorisY    To: wankerWillie gangGreen, fredbot, hondope, zulu, mau mau, hutus, lice, druids, morloks, 666ers (#0)

The problem is

you can'T fighT

evil wiTh evil

HiTler Tried ThaT

The gay - lib communisT agenda

is noT democracy

It is global fascism - Tyranny

It is whiTe Christian slavery - genocide

All founded on lies - guilT - blame

Boy

when Their bubble blows

The screw Turns

do They have a hurT - surprise coming

love
boris

ps

we should be naTural allies with Russia now

since The Bolsheviks

are ouT of power There

preTTy soon here Too

excepT for The media

BorisY posted on 2017-07-11 14:10:37   Reply   Private Reply

#2: misterwhite    To: Willie Green (#0)

his own intelligence agencies’ finding that Moscow, at Mr. Putin’s direction, tried to disrupt the election to help him win.

What a load of horse manure.

At best, they might discover that it was an individual in Russia who broke into the DNC server. Maybe. But those intelligence agencies never even examined the DNC server.

They have no idea that it was a Russian intelligence agency, or that it was directed by Putin, or that it affected the election (maybe it affected Hillary's campaign), or that they were doing it to help Trump win. After all, they did try to hack the RNC server also.

misterwhite posted on 2017-07-11 14:11:43   Reply   Private Reply

#3: redleghunter    To: Willie Green (#0)

The NYTs has now hit rock bottom adopting the "6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon" as their investigative technique.

redleghunter posted on 2017-07-11 14:14:31   Reply   Private Reply

#4: Justified    To: Willie Green (#0)

If you girls would have gone after Clintons or Obama from any era they would be in jail right now. Then we could have had different choices.

Do you know why nothing sticks to Trump? Because its all made up lies. I can not wait till he starts sending teams of lawyers after people! Now that would be fun to watch.

Justified posted on 2017-07-11 14:20:44   Reply   Private Reply

#5: Stoner    To: Justified (#4)

" I can not wait till he starts sending teams of lawyers after people! Now that would be fun to watch. "

YES !! I would love to see a bunch of the lib turds dressed in orange doing the perpwalk.

Maybe if Trump would spend less time " Tweeting " and more time with AG Sessions, he could accomplish that !! That would be far more important in my book !

Stoner posted on 2017-07-11 16:43:28   Reply   Private Reply

#6: nolu chan    To: Willie Green (#0)

Yes, we must get to the bottom of which Obama agency granted her parole entry after her visa was denied.

https://www.circa.com/story/2017/07/09/politics/russian-lawyer-who-got-inside-donald-trumps-inner-circle-had-been-denied-us-visa

Russian lawyer who got inside Donald Trump’s inner circle had been denied US visa

By John Solomon and Sara A. Carter
Circa
July 09, 2017 09:48 AM EDT

By her own account, the Russian lawyer that managed to slide her way into Trump Tower last year and meet with President Donald Trump’s eldest son, his campaign manager and son-in-law is a former Moscow prosecutor who had been denied a visa to enter the United States.

Natalia Veselnitskaya filed an affidavit in a federal case in New York describing how she managed to get special permission to enter the United States after the visa denial to help represent a Russian company called Prevezon Holdings owned by the Russian businessman Denis Katsyv in a case brought against it by U.S. prosecutors.

“I represent victims in many criminal cases involving economic crimes. I have been retained by Denis Katsyv and the defendants in this action to assist their attorneys in the United States, Baker & Hostetler LLP to prepare their defense,” she wrote in the January 2016 affidavit filed in court in New York City.

“As counsel to Defendants, it is important that I be able to participate in the defense of this action by traveling to the United States. For that reason, I applied for a visa to enter the United States, but was denied,” she added. “I also applied for entry visas for my children, so that they could be together with me over the Christmas holiday while I was working in New York on this lawsuit, but this was also denied. However, the United States did issue a parole letter for me to enter the United States in order to help defend this lawsuit.”

It was apparently during the time she was in the United States on that parole entry that she arranged to meet with Donald Trump Jr., Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and former campaign manager Paul Manafort on June 9, 2016 at Trump Tower.

[...]

Congressional investigators involved in the Russian influence case told Circa on Sunday that they are almost certain to probe if Veselnitskaya used her parole entry status to contact the Trump family and whether there is any connection to the Steele dossier and Fusion GPS.

“This is new information that raises all sorts of new questions and we are digging into it as we speak,” one congressional investigator told Circa, speaking only on condition of anonymity.

President Trump’s lawyers said Saturday they feared Veselnitskaya’s meeting at Trump Tower may have been part of a broader election opposition effort to smear the Republican by creating the impression he and his family had extensive ties to Russia as the Kremlin was interfering in the 2016 election.

“We have learned from both our own investigation and public reports that the participants in the meeting misrepresented who they were and who they worked for,” said Mark Corallo, a spokesman for President Trump’s legal team. “Specifically, we have learned that the person who sought the meeting is associated with Fusion GPS, a firm which according to public reports, was retained by Democratic operatives to develop opposition research on the President and which commissioned the phony Steele dossier. "

"These developments raise serious issues as to exactly who authorized and participated in any effort by Russian Nationals to influence our election in any manner,” Corallo said.

In her affidavit, Veselnitskaya described her path to becoming a successful private attorney in Moscow, starting with working as a Russian government prosecutor in Moscow,

“I have been practicing law since 1998. I am the founder and managing partner of the law offices of Kamerton Consulting. In 1998, I graduated with distinction from the Moscow State Legal Academy with a degree in jurisprudence,” she wrote. “Upon graduation from the Academy, I started working at the Prosecutor’s Office. I worked there for three years, overseeing the legality of statutes that were adopted by legislators of Moscow Oblast. After that I moved into private business.”

She also swore in the affidavit she did not speak English. Trump lawyers said she brought a Russian translator to the June meeting.Veselnitskaya also claimed U.S. government officials so distrusted her that they had her stopped and searched in London on her way back to New York in late 2015.

“I was detained for two hours by Heathrow Airport officials who speci?cally targeted me on the basis of the parole number that the United States Government had assigned to me. During this detention I was unjustifiably subjected to a strip search, for no apparent reason. I should not be subjected to such humiliation when I have been promised entry into the United States to defend against the scandalous accusations in this lawsuit on behalf of my clients.”

Sara A. Carter is a national and international award-winning investigative reporter whose stories have ranged from national security, terrorism, immigration and front line coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

nolu chan posted on 2017-07-11 18:29:16   Reply   Private Reply