The Briefing Room
General Category => Trump Legal Investigations => Topic started by: PeteS in CA on March 12, 2020, 10:19:54 pm
-
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/03/12/buried_from_trump_tower_meeting_translators_avowal_of_no_collusion_122774.html (https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/03/12/buried_from_trump_tower_meeting_translators_avowal_of_no_collusion_122774.html)
Buried From Trump Tower Meeting: Translator Telling FBI 'No Collusion'
Just days after news of the infamous Trump Tower meeting prompted heavy scrutiny from Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, the translator present told the FBI there was no talk of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, according to recently released documents.
This exculpatory evidence – which backed accounts of Donald Trump Jr. and other campaign officials in attendance – was not mentioned in Special Counsel Mueller’s final report two years later. And the silence in the interim occurred as sinister theorizing on cable TV and in the press helped shape a public impression of the June 9, 2016 meeting as central to collusion.
The new documents record that on July 12, 2017, four days after the New York Times first disclosed the meeting, relying on government leaks, the FBI interviewed Anatoli Samochornov, a freelance translator with long ties to the U.S. government who had been engaged by the Russian side. Elaborating the day after its initial report, the Times used more leaks to report that Trump Jr. had agreed to the meeting because he was told that a Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, would provide damaging information on Hillary Clinton.
Whatever the suspicions raised by the Trump son's emailed response, "If it's what you say I love it," the meeting didn't live up to the billing, judging from what the translator told the FBI. Bureau notes show he told agents, “There was no discussion of the 2016 United States presidential election or Collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.†...
So:
1. The Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr. was a nothingburger, and ...
2. ... Mueller's team knew this within days.