The Kremlin just stuck another knife in the back of Donald Trump Jr.
The Donald Trump Jr. story is getting more surreal by the hour – in this case literally. Just a couple hours ago I wrote that it was becoming more clear the Kremlin fed the Trump Jr. story to the media to send a message to Donald Trump (link). Now the Kremlin has just stuck another knife in the back of Trump Jr., and this time there’s no question that it’s being done on purpose.
Donald Trump Jr. met with Natalia Veselnitskaya, an attorney in Russia who doesn’t officially work for the Russian government, but has represented the Kremlin around the world. After word of the meeting first surfaced, she booked an interview with NBC and claimed she wasn’t connected to the Kremlin. But then came word that there was also a Russian spy in the meeting. Once he was outed, he volunteered that the Russian attorney had brought a folder full of documents about Hillary Clinton with her to the meeting. And now the Russian attorney is responding not by denying anything, but by suddenly admitting that she was coordinating with the Kremlin after all.
Veselnitskaya is now flat out admitting to the Wall Street Journal (link) that she had indeed been working with the Kremlin’s official top prosecutor to try to sabotage Hillary Clinton. There was no need for her to have acknowledged this today. She simply decided to share a detail that makes Donald Trump Jr. (and his father) look even more guilty than they did yesterday.
There is only one possible explanation for why these Kremlin reps keep revealing the increasingly dirty details of their meeting with Donald Trump Jr. in this drip-drip-drip fashion: they’re dragging it out and escalating it on purpose. They’re making sure it remains in the headlines every day, and that those headlines get worse every day. They’re also setting up the Trump team to look foolish by issuing partial denials that can then be quickly exposed as lies with the next revelation.
If the Kremlin really is trying to tear Donald Trump Jr. limb from limb in the hope of motivating Donald Trump to dig in and work harder on getting Russian sanctions lifted, as I’ve come to strongly suspect (link), then the Kremlin is being as vicious about it as possible. And it also means that we’re not even close to seeing the last shoe drop about this meeting. If you find Palmer Report valuable, make a donation.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report