Donald Trump Jr. is seeking to write off as a nonevent his meeting last year with a Russian lawyer who was said to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton. “It was such a nothing,” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday. “There was nothing to tell.”
But everything we know about the meeting — from whom it involved to how it was set up to how it unfolded — is in line with what intelligence analysts would expect an overture in a Russian influence operation to look like. It bears all the hallmarks of a professionally planned, carefully orchestrated intelligence soft pitch designed to gauge receptivity, while leaving room for plausible deniability in case the approach is rejected. And the Trump campaign’s willingness to take the meeting — and, more important, its failure to report the episode to U.S. authorities — may have been exactly the green light Russia was looking for to launch a more aggressive phase of intervention in the U.S. election campaign.
Let’s start with the interlocutor: Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. When arranging the meeting, music promoter and Trump family acquaintance Rob Goldstone referred to a “Russian government attorney.” Both Veselnitskaya and the Kremlin have subsequently denied any association. What’s beyond dispute is that she has lobbied for the United States to repeal Magnitsky Act sanctions against Russian officials, that she regularly represents the interests of the Moscow regional government and that her clients include the vice president of state-owned Russian Railways.
My read, as someone who has been part of the U.S. intelligence community for more than four decades, is that Veselnitskaya is probably too well-connected to have independently initiated such a high-level and sensitive encounter. If she had, her use of known Trump and Kremlin associates (Aras and Emin Agalarov) to help make introductions and the suggestion, in Goldstone’s account, that she wanted to share “official documents and information” as “part of Russia and its government’s support” for Trump could have gotten her into significant trouble. Her efforts to meet Trump associates would have surely come to the attention of Russian authorities at some point, given Russian government email monitoring and other means of surveillance. The Kremlin would look harshly on someone going rogue in a manner that would surely damage ongoing Russian intelligence operational efforts related to the U.S. presidential campaign.
A better explanation is that Veselnitskaya is far enough removed from Moscow’s halls of power to make her a good fit as an intermediary in an intelligence operation — as a “cut-out” with limited knowledge of the larger scheme and as an “access agent” sent to assess and test a high-priority target’s interest in cooperation. She may have had her own agenda going into the meeting: to lobby against the Magnitsky Act, which happens to impact some of her clients. But her agenda dovetailed with Kremlin interests — and it would have added another layer of plausible deniability. Russian intelligence practice is to co-opt such a person. News Friday that she was accompanied by Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist who is reportedly suspected of, though denies, having ties to Russian intelligence, further bolsters this reading.
Trump Jr.’s assertion that Veselnitskaya didn’t deliver the promised dirt in that meeting is also consistent with how Russian intelligence operates. So, too, is Akhmetshin’s account that Veselnitskaya presented a document that she said suggested illegal payments to the Democratic National Committee, but told Trump Jr. that supporting evidence would require more research. Russia would have wanted to feel out the campaign before sharing its most prized material. Intelligence officers prefer to dip their toes in the water before taking a plunge. And it’s too risky to attempt a blunt approach to an extremely sensitive target (such as the son of the Republican front-runner for president), especially on hostile (in this case, American) soil.
Moreover, Russian intelligence presumably would not have risked passing high-value information through Veselnitskaya. As an untrained asset or co-optee — not a professional intelligence officer by any account — she would not have been entrusted with making a direct intelligence recruitment approach, including the passage of compromising information. Formalizing a relationship with the Trump campaign would be left for another day. If and when that day came, the pitch would be carried out by an experienced intelligence officer in favorable circumstances, with the right Trump associate and on friendly turf.
But even at the soft-pitch stage, standard Russian intelligence practice would require making clear what was on offer. The point is to test the target. Are they open to entering into a compromising relationship? Will they rebuff the mere suggestion of such impropriety? Will they alert authorities and thus stand in the way of Russian efforts?
And here, the deal should have been obvious to everyone. Moscow intended to discredit Clinton and help get Trump elected, and in exchange it hoped the Republican would consider its interests — in sanctions relief and otherwise. The Russian government appears to have signaled its direct involvement and real intention in advance of the meeting, presumably to avoid the possibility that its offer might be misconstrued, perhaps naively, as an innocent gesture of support and nothing more.
From the Russian perspective, the fact that Trump Jr. agreed to the meeting would have been the first promising sign. That veteran political operative Paul Manafort and senior adviser Jared Kushner showed up with him would have furthered the impression that there was strong interest in Russian assistance (and vulnerability to compromise) on the part of the campaign. But, according to standard espionage tradecraft, the most notable achievement of this encounter lay in the campaign’s failure to report it to the appropriate U.S. authorities — as Russia would have known when there was no immediate, dramatic increase in U.S. counterintelligence scrutiny of its election-related operations.
We should be cautious about overestimating the significance of this episode in isolation. Russia may have extended other feelers to other Trump associates at other points in time. Indeed, the Steele dossier suggests that the Kremlin was trying to cultivate the Trumps as far back as 2011. But, based on the publicly available information, the June 2016 overture seems to have been a win for Russia. It helped set the stage for the possibility of subsequent contacts between Trump associates and witting agents of the Russian government. (Some of these contacts are now known, and others, perhaps not.) And it would have allowed Russian intelligence to be comfortable initiating the next phase of its operation — systematically leaking information on Clinton and trying to penetrate the U.S. voting process — with the knowledge that the Trump campaign was interested in such Russian government assistance.
Although the Kremlin could have meddled without active or tacit approval from the campaign, having the campaign on board would have made the meddling more effective. For example, Russia could be sure that its actions would fit with Trump campaign strategy. Even Trump Jr.’s initial thought to drop the Clinton information later in the summer would be valuable for the Kremlin to know in terms of best timing.
Russia also would have wanted an implicit if not explicit agreement that intelligence assistance would be rewarded by a grateful Trump administration willing to relieve sanctions and embark on a more constructive relationship. The president presumably would not be nearly as willing to shift the long-standing, hard-line U.S. approach toward Russia — or its position on Ukraine, NATO and other issues — if he didn’t have a full appreciation for the Russian contribution to his election victory.
And after Russia’s overtures to the Trump campaign and the Trump campaign’s public denials that it had ever interacted with Russians, Vladimir Putin may have had the kompromat he needed to indirectly influence the Republican Party (such as the GOP platform on Ukraine) and Trump if he made it to the White House. The worst outcome would be that Trump would lose the election and, as a billionaire with global interests, still be a very useful ally for Putin.
Had this Russian overture been rejected or promptly reported by the Trump campaign to U.S. authorities, Russian intelligence would have been forced to recalculate the risk vs. gain of continuing its aggressive operation to influence U.S. domestic politics. Russian meddling might have been compromised in its early stages and stopped in its tracks by U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies before it reached fruition by the late fall.
So the suggestion that this was a nothing meeting without consequence is, in all likelihood, badly mistaken.
outlook@washpost.com
Ryan Goodman, a professor at New York University School of Law, an editor at Just Security and a former special counsel to the general counsel of the Department of Defense, contributed to this essay.
Bernie Sanders did not win the Democratic presidential nomination, but he did create a muscular and highly engaged political movement that is active on the ground in every state. This movement extends beyond the group that evolved out of the Sanders campaign, Our Revolution, finding expression in a variety of organizations (the Working Families Party, Democracy for America, Progressive Democrats of America, Democratic Socialists of America) and in dozens of campaigns for local, state, and national office.
Sanders does not direct the movement, which has many components and moves in many directions. But he still defines it for millions of Americans. And when he makes major endorsements, they are big deals that make big news. Such is the case with his endorsement of Ben Jealous, the former NAACP president who is running for governor of Maryland. “It sounds like Maryland is ready for a political revolution,” Sanders told a a cheering crowd at the Silver Spring Civic Building Thursday morning, as he hailed Jealous’s “Lifetime of courageous activism” and ability to “speak to every community.”
Jealous was a key backer of Sanders in 2016, traveling with the candidate and delivering one of the most powerful addresses at the Democratic National Convention. But long before he became associated with the campaign, the 44-year-old organizer on issues ranging from voting rights to mass incarceration to environmental justice and economic inequality was identified as a likely contender for high office. Now he is bidding for a governorship that Democrats lost in 2014 but can win in 2018.
Sanders is backing Jealous as an act of loyalty to a political ally but also a bet on the future of progressive politics in Maryland and America. “With Ben as governor, we can make health care a right, not a privilege,” says Sanders. “We can create a minimum wage which is a living wage. We can stop the school-to-prison pipeline and end mass incarceration. We can make college tuition affordable, protect our environment and create good-paying jobs. Ben’s campaign has only just begun, but he has already generated tremendous grassroots energy from working families and young people throughout Maryland.”
All true. But what progressives also get is a new face on the national political stage. If Jealous wins the Democratic nomination in a crowded primary field that features a number of capable contenders, if he goes on to defeat Republican Governor Larry Hogan, and if he succeeds in making Maryland both a bastion of resistance to the Trump presidency and a center of progressive innovation, his name will eventually appear on lists of presidential and vice-presidential prospects.
Jealous now has his focus on Maryland, a state where his roots run deep and where there is plenty of interest in his declaration that “It’s time for Maryland to get back to doing big things again.” But accomplishing big things in one state has the potential to shape not just that state’s debate but also the discussion about what comes next for America. “It is imperative that we elect a bold, progressive governor who will fight on behalf of middle and working class families,” Our Revolution president Nina Turner said in announcing the group’s endorsement of Jealous. “Now is the time to elect unapologetic progressive voices across the country.”
As those progressives are elected, they will become definitional figures. Bernie Sanders knows this. He is actively seeking to share the spotlight. Indeed, with his endorsements of Jealous and other next-generation contenders, he is turning that spotlight in new directions. No one who knows Bernie Sanders imagines that he will cease to be a vital figure in the movement—the movements—that have extended from his 2016 candidacy. But he is seeking to expand those movements, to build them up and out, and to invite others into leadership roles. The purpose is to make it clear that the next American politics will be bigger and bolder, more inclusive and diverse, than the narrow and dysfunctional politics it is certain to replace.
