Drip drip drip. Donald Trump Jr. says there was no follow-up to his notorious Trump Tower meeting with Russians promising dirt on Hillary Clinton, but of course, there was. CNN has the story: Rob Goldstone, the British publicist who set up the meeting between Junior (along with Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort) and an array of Russians with very interesting connections, subsequently sent a series of emails to Trump connections:
An email from Goldstone to senior Trump aide Dan Scavino, now the White House director of social media, reveals a previously undisclosed topic that was discussed at the meeting. It encourages Scavino to get candidate Trump to create a page on the Russian social networking site VK, telling him that "Don and Paul" were on board with the idea -- a reference to then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Trump Jr. [...]
In one email dated June 14, 2016, Goldstone forwarded a CNN story on Russia's hacking of DNC emails to his client, Russian pop star Emin Agalarov, and Ike Kaveladze, a Russian who attended the meeting along with Trump Jr., Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and Manafort, describing the news as "eerily weird" given what they had discussed at Trump Tower five days earlier.
Don Jr. was not included on any of the emails. (That we know of so far—given his history, it won’t be shocking if he posts a batch of previously undiscovered and highly incriminating emails on Instagram any minute now.) But while sources tell CNN that news of the DNC hacking wasn’t so very weird after all because what was discussed at the meeting was information on Russian funding of the DNC … yeah, right. If the guy who set up the meeting thought it was “eerily weird,” he probably had his reasons.
On their own, emails that didn’t go any closer to Donald Trump The Father than Dan Scavino might seem like not so much. But as we’ve seen again and again through the course of this investigation, the dots often end up connecting in much more sinister ways than you’d think at first look. So consider this one more set of dots in play.