Why the indictment of Trump Tower Russian lawyer Natalya Veselnitskaya is really bad news for Donald Trump Jr
This morning the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York landed a criminal indictment against Natalya Veselnitskaya, the Russian government lawyer who famously met with Donald Trump Jr and other Trump campaign officials at Trump Tower during the 2016 election. Veselnitskaya’s indictment is really, really, really bad news for Trump Jr, at the worst possible time for him.
Fascinatingly, Natalya Veselnitskaya hasn’t been indicted for her Trump Tower meeting. Instead she’s been indicted for obstruction of justice in what had been a separate civil suit brought by SDNY. It takes a special kind of stupid to get yourself criminally indicted in a civil case, but she’s managed to pull it off. This means two things, and both of them directly impact the criminal case against Donald Trump Jr.
Veselnitskaya has been indicted for conspiring with the Kremlin to obstruct justice, which firmly establishes that she is an official representative of the Kremlin, and has been all along. In turn, this legally establishes that Donald Trump Jr was conspiring with the Kremlin to sabotage the 2016 U.S. election when he met with Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower. In other words, this seals the deal when it comes to demonstrating that Trump Jr was committing treason (or the non-wartime equivalent) when he held this meeting.
Keep in mind that Donald Trump Jr’s emails prove he knew in advance who he was meeting with and, that the meeting was for the criminal purpose of accepting stolen goods, as well as illegally accepting gifts of value from a foreign government on behalf of a campaign. So he knowingly engaged in a criminal plot against the United States. In other words, he’s going to prison for the rest of his life. The second issue here is whether Veselnitskaya will now cut a plea deal against Junior. Even if not, the Feds still have him nailed. Today is a huge step in his demise.
