The headlines have been dominated this past week by Trump advisor George Papadopoulos’ efforts to establish contact between The Donald and Vladimir Putin. Just today, though Jeff Sessions is reported to have quashed the idea and said it should never be spoken of again, CNN is reporting that Trump was interested in the idea.
A former Trump campaign adviser says Donald Trump listened to George Papadopoulos when he presented the idea of a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“He heard him out,” JD Gordon, a campaign national security adviser who attended the March 31, 2016 meeting, told CNN Thursday.
Asked about the meeting on Friday, Trump told reporters at the White House, “it was a very unimportant meeting, took place a long time, don’t remember much about it.”
CNN reported Wednesday that Trump did not dismiss the idea of arranging a meeting with Russia’s president when it was suggested in a meeting with his campaign foreign policy advisers last year.
The look of things is that Trump privately authorized an end-run around his campaign pros using different people.
Remember this story from May?
Jared Kushner and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak discussed the possibility of creating a back channel — a secret communication channel — between the Trump team and Russian officials, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
And this one?
The United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting in January between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladimir Putin as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump, according to U.S., European and Arab officials.
The meeting took place around Jan. 11 — nine days before Trump’s inauguration — in the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean, officials said.
The Kushner meeting was in December, 2016, soon after the election, and the Prince meeting was in January, scarcely a week before the inauguration.
Clearly, Trump was impatient to have a talk with Putin and quietly put some diplomatic amateurs to work to make it happen.
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March, 2016: Papadopoulos tells Trump he can create a communications channel with the Kremlin. According to reports, Sessions quashes the idea, and says it should never be discussed again.
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June, 2016: Jared Kushner, Don, Jr., et. al., meet with a Russian lawyer who has close ties to the Kremlin to discuss ‘dirt’ they have on Hilary Clinton.
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November, 2016: The election.
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December, 2016: Kushner is tasked with setting-up communications with Putin, and fails.
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January, 2017: Erik Prince, a mercenary, is tasked with setting-up communications with Putin, and fails.
Given that Trump-buddy Roger Stone was in contact with the DNC hackers, and he and Trump clearly knew of pending Wikileaks dumps, it looks pretty clear to me what happened: Trump set-up some kind of private communications channel with the Russian intelligence services, end-running his own campaign pros using people outside their orbit, and thought it was time for he and ol’ Vladimir to get together for a meet-up after the election.
This isn’t going away, no matter how much Trump huffs and puffs.