I’m going to have to revise my Indictment Bingo card.
George Papadopoulos emailed several people in the Trump campaign about his contacts with Russian officials, and the Washington Post has identified some of them.
- Sam Clovis, campaign national co-chairman.
- Corey Lewandowski, campaign manager.
- Paul Manafort, international man of money-baggery.
- Rick Gates, assistant evildoer.
The article also names some of the people on the Russian side of the equation.
The last couple of days have been fun, but I’m worried about something. People from the Russian government wanted to meet with Donnie Two Scoops, but isn’t that normal? He was a presidential candidate from one of America’s two largest political parties.
Manafort forwarded Papadopoulos’s email to another campaign official, stating: “We need someone to communicate that DT is not doing these trips,” referring to a trip to Russia. “It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.”
That’s ambiguous. It could mean they don’t want to attract attention to the meetings, or it could mean they don’t want the Russians to get the wrong idea. The latter option is rendered less likely by what we know from other reports: Some in the campaign at least seemed open to accepting “dirt” on Hillary Clinton from the Russians. Will that be enough?
I hope so, and there’s some support for that hope. This is from a Vox article in July about that meeting Don Jr., Manafort and Jared Kushner took when they were promised damning info from Russia about Clinton:
Trump Jr.‘s decision to take the meeting in and of itself likely violated campaign finance law, which does not require you to actually get anything useful from foreigners. In other words, the mere fact that Trump Jr. asked for information from a Russian national about Clinton might have constituted a federal crime.
“The law states that no person shall knowingly solicit or accept from a foreign national any contribution to a campaign of an item of value,” Goodman tells me. “There is now a clear case that Donald Trump Jr. has met all the elements of the law, which is a criminally enforced federal statute.”
A preview of coming attractions?