Publicist wonders if he was 'patsy' in Trump Tower meeting

As Goldstone tells the story, he actually didn’t know what he was talking about. The idea that the “well-connected” Russian lawyer had documents was not anything Agalarov had told him. He just figured that a presumably “official” Russian lawyer who wanted to make a presentation to the Trumps must have documents since “documents and official went together like tea and scones.”

As for the Russian government’s support for Trump, “this was pure puffery and even a bit of flattery.” Nobody had told him the Russian government was backing Trump, he writes, and he had “no idea” if it was actually true. He just inferred that was the case given “Vladimir Putin’s praise for Donald Trump.” (On this point, the U.S. intelligence community later concluded, he turned out to be 100 percent correct.)

Even the reference to the “Crown prosecutor” was a bit of a mishmash, although one Goldstone is a bit sensitive about. Russia doesn’t have a Crown prosecutor — the country hasn’t had a “Crown” since Czar Nicholas II was overthrown in 1917. Goldstone insists he knew this. Most accounts until now have assumed he was referring to Russia’s prosecutor general, Yura Chaika, a very high-ranging and feared figure in the Kremlin. But this isn’t true either, Goldstone says. He knew nothing of Chaika or his actual title. He just used a British phrase — the United Kingdom does have Crown prosecutors — to dress up the importance of that “well-connected” lawyer in order to get the meeting he was told to set up. The lawyer was Natalia Veselnitskaya, a name that meant nothing to him then but would later make waves when the meeting became public.

“At that point, I was so intent on getting a response from Don Jr. that, honestly, I would have told him I was bringing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to the meeting if I thought it would get his immediate attention,” he writes.

How credible is Goldstone’s account? It’s hard to say for sure, though it’s worth noting that Goldstone no longer works for Agalarov and doesn’t seem to have any strong ongoing allegiance to him, concluding in the end that the pop singer and his father threw him “under the bus.” And, as Goldstone notes, he has told essentially the same version of this story behind closed doors under oath to three congressional committees and before Mueller’s grand jury.

In any case, Goldstone’s email was not, in and of itself, the most scandalous part of his exchange with the GOP candidate’s son. It was Trump Jr.’s immediate response: “If it’s what you say, I love it especially later in the summer.” Told of a foreign power’s offer to help his father’s campaign, Trump Jr. didn’t call the FBI. He told Goldstone he wanted to hear more.

Goldstone’s argument, to the extent that he has one, is that it wasn’t his email (or at least his email alone) that finally led to the meeting between a delegation of Russians and Trump campaign officials. Even while expressing enthusiasm for the idea of getting Kremlin assistance for the Trump campaign, Trump Jr. mentioned in the very same response that “perhaps I just speak to Emin first.” So Goldstone immediately relayed this to his client, sending him Trump Jr.’s cellphone number. This resulted in a phone call a few days later between Emin Agalarov and the younger Trump. Whatever they talked about — a subject about which Goldstone is in the dark — their conversation that day led directly to the meeting on June 9, 2016.

There is clearly much here to be suspicious about. As congressional investigators have noted, in between two phone calls with Agalarov’s number in Moscow on June 6, Trump Jr. had a three- to four-minute call with a “blocked number”— raising questions about whether he was talking to his father. (As Corey Lewandowski has testified, Trump’s number at his residence in Trump Tower was blocked.) The next day, Tuesday, June 7, Trump vowed he was about to give a “major speech” about the “corrupt dealings” of the Clintons — a talk that he said would be “very, very interesting” and that he would give “probably Monday” of the following week, after the meeting with the Russians was to take place. The speech was never delivered.

Goldstone’s account of the meeting itself reinforces what others in the Trump orbit have testified: It was a dud. A troop of Russians — led by Veselnitskaya— was ushered into a Trump Tower conference room to present their supposedly damning material to Trump Jr., campaign manager Paul Manafort and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. But Veselnitskaya quickly lost her audience, talking in a “monotonous, droning voice” about a couple of people in investor Bill Browder’s hedge fund who had given to Democrats. Since this didn’t implicate Clinton in any wrongdoing, the Trump camp immediately lost interest. Manafort, according to Goldstone, spent the whole time staring at his iPhone reading emails. A fidgety Kushner grew “more irritated and agitated” and finally interrupted the Russian to say: He had “no idea” what point she was trying to make.

Soon enough, Veselnitskaya switched gears and started talking passionately about the injustice of the Magnitsky Act — the law imposing sanctions on Russian human rights abusers — and why that had led to the ban on American adoptions of Russian babies. Trump Jr. cut the meeting off. An embarrassed Goldstone apologized for wasting his time.

Toward the end of his book, Goldstone appears haunted by his role. “How could I be sure I hadn’t been duped into setting up the meeting?” he writes. “Had I been a patsy? A ‘useful idiot’?”

Legitimate questions — and there are others that still linger about the Trump Tower meeting: What did Trump himself know about it? What was said between Trump Jr. and Emin Agalarov? And why did Kushner and Manafort feel compelled to attend — and what understandings might there have been after it was over?

But if Goldstone can’t clear them up, Mueller may be closer to getting some more answers. As a result of Manafort’s recent guilty plea, he is now cooperating in the special counsel’s investigation and may soon be ready to fill in some of the gaps.

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