Veselnitskaya told NBC News that she did not have any damaging information about Clinton to offer at the meeting and that was never her intention. “In the end,” Trump Jr told Fox host Sean Hannity on Tuesday night, “there was probably some bait-and-switch about what it was really supposed to be about. In the emails, Trump Jr had been promised “very high level and sensitive information,” but he has complained repeatedly in the past few days that Veselnitskaya failed to deliver the goods. Did Trump Sr know about the meeting before it was first reported? By participating in the misleading statement, did he knowingly involve himself in a cover-up about the true nature of the meeting? That statement turned out to be highly misleading. A New York Times report said that Trump personally signed off on an initial statement issued by Trump Jr about the meeting, however. Trump Jr has denied that his father, the president, knew about his meeting with Veselnitskaya. Did the meeting mean anything, or form part of a broader pattern of connections? On the president’s role The conclusion of those investigations may show the Trump Jr emails and meeting to be significant, or merely a footnote. These investigations proceed out of public view: inside the justice department, spearheaded by special counsel Robert Mueller and the FBI, and inside Congress. It is unclear how the emails and the meeting they document fit within the larger context of investigations into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. The Trump Jr emails emerged not from a leak by investigators but from work by New York Times reporters. Who was she acting for and did she have anything to share? On the broader investigation In a recent piece for the Guardian, Moscow correspondent Shaun Walker wrote that Veselnitskaya was either “a well-networked insider relaying secret Kremlin information, or a chancer who somehow managed to get into the room with three top Trump advisers in the midst of a presidential campaign”. Significantly, Veselnitskaya has not been linked to the hacking effort that stole emails from the Democratic National Committee and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, nor has she been linked to the alleged targeting of certain US districts with fake news or the attempted spoilage of voter rolls. The meeting whose arrangement the emails chronicle brought together Trump Jr and two other campaign aides – Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner – with Natalia Veselnitskaya, described in the emails as a “Russian government attorney”, though she denies having worked for the Kremlin. Unanswered questions remain in five important areas: On the Russian lawyer However, the greater significance of the emails – what they indicate in terms of the scope of potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, especially where documented Russian tampering with the 2016 presidential election is concerned – is unclear. “Trump officials at the highest levels knew Russia was working to aid Donald Trump and welcomed Russia’s interference.” “This is black and white,” tweeted Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee.
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