Did Donald Trump use Kanye West to distract the media from Jared Kushner’s meeting with Russian bank?

| 7:49 pm EDT May 29, 2017
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It was one of the most randomly absurd moments of what was already a historically absurd transition period: Donald Trump brought in hip hop artist Kanye West for a meeting at Trump Tower in New York in December for no apparent reason. But in light of newly unfolding details involving Jared Kushner and Russian officials, it’s time to explore whether that Kanye meeting may have had a very specific purpose after all.

There’s a long running theory across the internet that Donald Trump held that meeting with Kanye West at Trump Tower in December in order to distract the media from a secret meeting that was simultaneously taking place in Trump Tower between Kushner and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The theory says that Kanye came in the front door, thus captivating the television cameras perched out front, just as Kislyak and Kushner and Michael Flynn were sneaking in the back door.

I’ve always ignored this theory, because those two meetings didn’t happen on the same day. Kushner and Kislyak met in the earliest days of December 2016, while Kanye and Trump met on December 13th. But it turns out the theory may have been half right, because there was a second and even more suspicious Kushner-Russia meeting at Trump Tower in December, which they would have had even more reason to distract the media from.

This past week’s new revelations have pinned down the Kushner-Kislyak meeting as having taken place on December 1st or December 2nd (source: link). But it’s now clear that the meeting was merely a pretext for Kushner’s subsequent meeting with the head of a Russian government-controlled bank, also at Trump Tower, later in December. And that’s the ultra-suspicious meeting in which Kushner was allegedly securing Russian bank loans for the Trump business empire in exchange for the sanctions relief he’d just finished promising the Ambassador.

The precise date of the mid December meeting between Jared Kushner and the head of the Russian bank isn’t known. But it’s time for us to try to pin it down more precisely. Because if it did take place on December 13th, and if Donald Trump did arrange a simultaneous stunt meeting with Kanye West in order to distract the media, that would be crucial. It would prove that Trump knew Kushner was meeting with the Russian bank, obliterating any chance Trump may have had at deniability for Kushner’s illegal actions. We’ll keep digging.