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On Friday, the Justice Department released a slightly-less-redacted version of the Mueller report.
Donald Trump was told in advance that Wikileaks would be releasing documents embarrassing to the Clinton campaign and subsequently informed advisors that he expected more releases would be coming… In July 2016, Roger Stone told Trump as well as several campaign advisors that he had spoken with Julian Assange and that WikiLeaks would be publishing the documents in a matter of days.
The newly unredacted portions of the Mueller report also show that after the initial email dump by WikiLeaks, Trump personally asked Manafort to keep in touch with Stone, who in turn told the then-campaign chairman to keep him “apprised of any developments with WikiLeaks.” Investigators were also told by Gates that Trump had multiple phone conversations with Stone during the campaign and that, following one call held en route to LaGuardia airport, “Trump told Gates that more releases of damaging information would be coming.”
Mueller examined whether President Donald Trump lied to him in written answers during the Russia investigation… In written testimony to Mueller’s team in November 2018, Trump denied being aware of any communications between Stone, Manafort, Gates, or Donald Trump Jr and WikiLeaks or Assange. Yet, the newly public portions show that Trump did know about a Stone-Wikileaks connection.
I wrote about the main takeaways from Bolton’s book last week. Since then, we’ve learned a few more details, which I’ll briefly list below. Bolton sat for an ABC interview on Sunday. You can read the transcript here.
In an Axios interview on Friday, Trump said he resisted punishing China for its mass internment of ethnic Uighurs last year for fear of jeopardizing trade talks with Beijing. This confirms a damning claim in Bolton’s book. As NYT writes, it is a blunt admission of Trump’s transactional approach to human rights and willingness to subordinate other U.S. policy priorities to a potential trade deal he considers vital to his re-election.
Bolton writes that Trump was eager - even desperate - to meet with Putin. Bolton said he saw Trump display “the same fascination with speaking with a leader like Putin that we saw with respect to Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un… The president himself used to comment on how strange it was that in one trip he took to a NATO summit, a summit with Theresa May, the prime minister of Britain, and then Vladimir Putin in Helsinki that he thought the easiest, most pleasant one might be with Vladimir Putin.” z/story?id=71287825))
Trump compared his courtship of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un to dating and “always wanted to be the one who broke up with the girl first,” Bolton told NPR. “[Trump] used that to describe whether he would cancel the summit with Kim Jong-un first or whether we would risk the North Koreans canceling it.” When NPR interviewer Steve Inskeep asked if the president had “a kind of romantic approach to numerous dictators”, Bolton agreed: “Yeah, I think that’s an accurate description.”
Bolton says Trump “directly” told him his goal last year was to link “military assistance and that opportunity to go after Joe Biden.” "It was a trade. It was a trade of an investigation in exchange for the security assistance,” Bolton says. This is the definition of quid pro quo. z/story?id=71287825))
Russia and Putin
To add to what Bolton recounted about Trump and Putin’s relationship (above), former National Security Council member Fiona Hill told The New Yorker about her experiences…
Hill said Trump’s translator for a 2017 meeting with Putin told her that Trump assured the Russian leader that he believed Putin never meddled in the 2016 election. Trump then took the translator’s notes. At the end of the meeting, Putin told Trump, “Let’s talk later.” The two had a private conversation at dinner with only Putin’s translator present.
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On Friday, the Justice Department released a slightly-less-redacted version of the Mueller report.
Donald Trump was told in advance that Wikileaks would be releasing documents embarrassing to the Clinton campaign and subsequently informed advisors that he expected more releases would be coming… In July 2016, Roger Stone told Trump as well as several campaign advisors that he had spoken with Julian Assange and that WikiLeaks would be publishing the documents in a matter of days.
The newly unredacted portions of the Mueller report also show that after the initial email dump by WikiLeaks, Trump personally asked Manafort to keep in touch with Stone, who in turn told the then-campaign chairman to keep him “apprised of any developments with WikiLeaks.” Investigators were also told by Gates that Trump had multiple phone conversations with Stone during the campaign and that, following one call held en route to LaGuardia airport, “Trump told Gates that more releases of damaging information would be coming.”
Mueller examined whether President Donald Trump lied to him in written answers during the Russia investigation… In written testimony to Mueller’s team in November 2018, Trump denied being aware of any communications between Stone, Manafort, Gates, or Donald Trump Jr and WikiLeaks or Assange. Yet, the newly public portions show that Trump did know about a Stone-Wikileaks connection.
- Considering the contradictory evidence, the special counsel’s office weighed the possibility that Trump “no longer had clear recollections” of what happened two years earlier, but also wondered whether “the President's conduct could also be viewed as reflecting his awareness that Stone could provide evidence that would run counter to the President's denials and would link the President to Stone's efforts to reach out to WikiLeaks."
I wrote about the main takeaways from Bolton’s book last week. Since then, we’ve learned a few more details, which I’ll briefly list below. Bolton sat for an ABC interview on Sunday. You can read the transcript here.
In an Axios interview on Friday, Trump said he resisted punishing China for its mass internment of ethnic Uighurs last year for fear of jeopardizing trade talks with Beijing. This confirms a damning claim in Bolton’s book. As NYT writes, it is a blunt admission of Trump’s transactional approach to human rights and willingness to subordinate other U.S. policy priorities to a potential trade deal he considers vital to his re-election.
- Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “President Trump’s admission that he is looking the other way and enabling one of the worst human rights atrocities of our time in order to ink a trade deal is appalling… Since Day One of his Administration, President Trump has had the tools to hold Chinese officials accountable for these human rights abuses and others including in Hong Kong by deploying sanctions under the 2016 Global Magnitsky Act, yet has refused to do so.”
Bolton writes that Trump was eager - even desperate - to meet with Putin. Bolton said he saw Trump display “the same fascination with speaking with a leader like Putin that we saw with respect to Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un… The president himself used to comment on how strange it was that in one trip he took to a NATO summit, a summit with Theresa May, the prime minister of Britain, and then Vladimir Putin in Helsinki that he thought the easiest, most pleasant one might be with Vladimir Putin.” z/story?id=71287825))
Trump compared his courtship of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un to dating and “always wanted to be the one who broke up with the girl first,” Bolton told NPR. “[Trump] used that to describe whether he would cancel the summit with Kim Jong-un first or whether we would risk the North Koreans canceling it.” When NPR interviewer Steve Inskeep asked if the president had “a kind of romantic approach to numerous dictators”, Bolton agreed: “Yeah, I think that’s an accurate description.”
Bolton says Trump “directly” told him his goal last year was to link “military assistance and that opportunity to go after Joe Biden.” "It was a trade. It was a trade of an investigation in exchange for the security assistance,” Bolton says. This is the definition of quid pro quo. z/story?id=71287825))
Russia and Putin
To add to what Bolton recounted about Trump and Putin’s relationship (above), former National Security Council member Fiona Hill told The New Yorker about her experiences…
Hill said Trump’s translator for a 2017 meeting with Putin told her that Trump assured the Russian leader that he believed Putin never meddled in the 2016 election. Trump then took the translator’s notes. At the end of the meeting, Putin told Trump, “Let’s talk later.” The two had a private conversation at dinner with only Putin’s translator present.
- Later that year, Trump and Putin had another unscheduled exchange, at an economic summit in Da Nang, Vietnam. A White House official who accompanied Trump said he overheard the beginning of the conversation, in which Trump engaged in “mundane small talk” with Putin, before he and his foreign counterparts were escorted out of the room. Hill said, “That’s the one meeting where nobody has any clue about what was discussed.”
- Matthew Miller, who led Attorney General Eric Holder’s communications team, responded: “This would be a real travesty. Bout has the blood of thousands of people on his hands, and his arrest and extradition was a major U.S. accomplishment that some of our allies helped us with at significant cost.”
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