The three NY Times sources ...

" ... according to three people with knowledge of the email.

The email to the younger Mr. Trump was sent by Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid reporter who helped broker the June 2016 meeting. In a statement on Sunday, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he was interested in receiving damaging information about Mrs. Clinton, but gave no indication that he thought the lawyer might have been a Kremlin proxy.

Mr. Goldstone’s message, as described to The New York Times by the three people, indicates that the Russian government was the source of the potentially damaging information. It does not elaborate on the wider effort by Moscow to help the Trump campaign.

There is no evidence to suggest that the promised damaging information was related to Russian government computer hacking that led to the release of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails. The meeting took place less than a week before it was widely reported that Russian hackers had infiltrated the committee’s servers."  NY Times

------------

 Goldstone was not one of the magic three.  If that is so, then the magic three are people who had access or have current access to this e-mail message as a result of their public employment.  Because this was an e-mail message between two US residents, it must IMO have been collected under a FISA court warrant.  What the given justification to the court would have been, I cannot imagine, but I feel certain that the real purpose of the intercept was to surveil the Trump camp for whatever might be useful.   

What might the identities be of the magic three?  IMO people whose initials are: SR, JB and JC should not be excluded from consideration.

This disclosure by the magic three is IMO a felony.  pl 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/us/politics/donald-trump-jr-russia-email-candidacy.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=span-ab-top-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Comments

[turcopolier]

LondonBob

I do think it is the top level Obama people. They are both reckless and desperate. JB is capable of anything. pl

[Babak Makkinejad]

I suppose that Donald Trump ought to consider himself lucky that no one among his enemies in US is cognizant of the fact that Azeris are Shia Muslims and thus belong to that Enemy of the West called "Party of Ali" to which belong Syria, Yemen, Iran, and Iraq.

[turcopolier]

fourthandlong

I am sorry that you find me lacking in imagination. That is an opinion I have not heard often. The question is not one of "legal rigor.' The real question is one of access to the e-mails. Who would have had access to the E-mails? These were private e-mails between people who were not in office. Actually DJT Jr has NEVER been in office. Nor has he had a government security clearance. Did the people at the meeting release the e-mails to the NY Times? Why would they do that? Did the Russians release the e-mails to the NY Times? Why would they do that? Would DJT's correspondent have released the e-mails? Why would he do that? Would the Trump Tower office staff have released the e-mails (if they had access to them)? Why would they do that? Well, who is left who would have had access to the e-mails? pl

[Eric Newhill]

LondonBob,
The more I think about the opening lines of the email thread, the more I am convinced that it was always intended to be a set-up; an entrapment.

The whole part about Russia's ongoing support of the Trump campaign....that is just weird stuff to have in the email. I suppose if Putin himself were sending the email, it would make more sense. However, it is totally out of place for the Brit to be saying. How would he know anything about Russian support ongoing or otherwise? Why would the Russians ask for him to include a statement about what should be secret collusion? They wouldn't.

Jr should have smelled a rat. But he got carried away with the possibility of getting some useful info to use against Clinton. Inexperience.

IMO, they were hoping that Jr would reply to that aspect of the email in a way that could be construed to be incriminating. He didn't and that's why the email thread was original used. Now, because at least Jr didn't question the ongoing Russian support, the thread is being produced. It's down to this being all they've got left in the anti-trump/Russia collusion arsenal.

Agreed, that this could have been part of the "evidence" that was being gathered to support a FISA warrant.

IMO, what I thinking totally supports Col Lang's suggestion of who is behind the leak (the three sets of initials)

[Babak Makkinejad]

Thank you for your comments.

I read Goldberg's piece, it is a sad testimonial to a confused minds; searching, as it where, for an anchor.

I do not have any suggestions for the predicaments of Europe - clearly the Enlightenment Project failed the Jews of Europe but, withdrawing into some sort of fortress is not going to resolve the issues of multiple religions in Europe that are at war over the disposition of Palestine.

I have the same sense when I look at Binyamin Netanyahu.

[HawkOfMay]

I'm a bit late on commenting on this. I think a point that is being missed is that while Mr. Trump (jr.), Mr. Manafort, and Mr. Kushner talking (as far as I can tell) to Veselnitskaya is not illegal lying to federal investigators is. If anything will get the Trump family and associates into trouble it will be this point.

Anyone involved in this cannot talk to each other to 'get their stories' straight. That would be illegal. Leaking all of this is one way to tell all parties involved "Hey, this is what I'm going to tell the feds" without tripping over the various laws. I'm not saying anyone has lied to federal investigators but IF they did the feds now have them over a barrel.

The problem is that Title 18, United States Code, Section 1001 gives the federal government way too much power.
> Title 18 ... makes it a crime to: 1) knowingly and willfully; 2) make any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation; 3) in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative or judicial branch of the United States. Your lie does not even have to be made directly to an employee of the national government as long as it is "within the jurisdiction" of the ever expanding federal bureaucracy.

http://corporate.findlaw.com/litigation-disputes/how-to-avoid-going-to-jail-under-18-u-s-c-section-1001-for-lying.html

[Stephanie]

No, there is not. However, as my post said, an argument is being made:

http://time.com/4854592/donald-trump-jr-russia-email-laws/

'If Bauer is right, then some argue that he could be in legal jeopardy even if the meeting didn't result in any valuable information changing hands, as Trump Jr. has claimed. "The fact that he . . . met with her is an overt act that may support criminal intent,'' Notre Dame University law professor Jimmy Gurule told USA Today. "Ignorance of the law is no defense."'

As the article notes, there is disagreement on the matter, hence my reference to an argument being made. I doubt that any prosecution will be forthcoming.

[per]

There's an awkwardness between the promise of anti-Hillary information in the Don Jr-Goldstone correspondence and the subsequent meeting's conversation on adoption laws. The set up looks strange, almost comical. Is this the best the Kremlin can do? What’s going on?

Veselnitskaya is not credible as an informant on Hillary dirt, but she is credible as a Magnitsky Act-lobbyist. A theory is therefore that the original play was to tie the Dirty Dossier with the Magnitsky Act. The goal was to connect Veselnitskaya with Trump and then with anti-Magnitsky Act lobbying on Capitol Hill (five days after the meeting with Don Jr she visited Capitol Hill.) The Dirty Dossier showed that Putin had something on Trump, and Putin is now using Trump to remove sanctions...

But then something happened: someone leaked Hillary's e-mails. "Putin hacked Hillary's e-mails" became the overwhelming story. (And it was hard to see how Trump could be of help to Putin in this activity).

Originally, the Don Jr-Goldstone correspondence was not important: the e-mails were probably not meant to be published. The promise of dirt on Hillary was probably a sales pitch invented by Rob Goldstone, to get access to Trump. So now when the plotters in desperation have released the correspondence, no one understands anything. Why does Putin promise dirt on Hillary but deliver talks on adoption? All the beautiful work of ex-MI6 agents, linking Dirty Dossiers to Capitol Hill lobbying, is lost in confusion.

[turcopolier]

per

don't post things twice. pl

[Larry Kart]

"Well, who is left who would have had access to the e-mails?"

As I suggested in a previous post, Kushner's legal team — "The emails were discovered in recent weeks by Mr. Kushner’s legal team as it reviewed documents, and the team amended his clearance forms to disclose it…” NYT 7/11.

My candidate for would-be mastermind here is Kushner's lead attorney Jamie Gorelick, a name some may recall from the past.

[turcopolier]

Larry Kart
Why would Kushner's legal team release this to the post? to incriminate his brother in law? This doesn't sound like you, Larry. pl

[per]

Sorry about that.

[Larry Kart]

Sorry, it is me, but thanks for your faith that normally I'm more sensible.

I'm certainly not familiar with, can't even begin to imagine, the family dynamics of the Trumps and Kushners, but leaving aside the presence or absence of warm family feelings, I'm thinking that if anyone in this menage has significant legal concerns at this point, it is Kushner, not Trump, Jr., and that the release of this material -- to which, if one believes that 7/11 NYT story to which I linked, Kushner's legal team had access -- might be an attempt, albeit (so it would seem) an absurdly short-sighted one, to deflect attention from Kushner. Again, from where you and I sit, that doesn't make much sense other than in the shortest of short runs, if then, but it wouldn't be the first time that something these people did didn't make much sense.

Further, to repeat myself, from the time she first popped into view as Kushner's lead attorney, I've been wondering what the heck Jamie Gorelick

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Gorelick

with all her various connections as a former high-ranking DOJ official and, I assume, veteran DC water carrier, is doing here. Yes, everybody’s got to be someplace, and a lawyer might be just a lawyer, but Gorelick's presence at Kushner’s shoulder makes my spider sense tingle.

[Larry Kart]

P.S. A tidbit from Gorelick's past:

"While serving as Deputy Attorney General under Bill Clinton, Gorelick spoke in favor of banning the use of strong encryption and called for a key escrow system to allow the Federal government access to encrypted communication."

[Freudenschade]

Col.,

Admittedly, the Washington Examiner is barely a news source, but a former college roommate of mine was at the event and confirms Stone's statement. Stone is certainly a dirty trickster, and this isn't the first time he's accused Kushner of being a leaker. Did Kushner leak the emails? Curiouser and curiouser.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/roger-stone-reveals-initials-of-who-he-says-is-leaker-of-donald-trump-jrs-emails/article/2628473

[turcopolier]

freudenschade

Was Stone at the meeting? If not, how does he know this? You are a left winger. It is very funny that you use Roger Stone as evidence from a Q&A at a Young Republicans meeting that was published in the Washington Examiner. Someone told me that Stone tried the same line out on him on an air flight a couple of days ago. I will say to you as I did to Larry Kart, do you really think that Kushner deep-sixed his brother in law? pl

[turcopolier]

Larry Kart

Yes, but what is the relevance of that? pl

[Larry Kart]

As to whether I really think Kushner deep-sixed his brother-in-law, I know it's a fable, but a scorpion asks a frog to carry it across a river. The frog is afraid of being stung, but the scorpion argues that if it did so, they would both drown. The frog agrees, but midway across the scorpion stings the frog, dooming them both. When the frog asks why, the scorpion replies that, "It's my nature."

As for the relevance of Gorelick calling as Deputy AG under Clinton for a system to allow the Federal government access to encrypted communication, it suggests to me that she has swum though fairly dark waters before and may think that she still knows her way through them.

[pantaraxia]

Perhaps the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. After all it was Kushner’s father who did exactly that - deep-sixed his brother -in -law. He attempted to blackmail (smear?) said brother -in -law by hiring a prostitute to seduce him, taped the encounter, and threatened to reveal the tapes. When the attempt was rebuffed Kushner’s father showed the tapes to his brother -in -law’s wife, his own sister. A real class act. Lesson learned? Perhaps the vaunted Trump family loyalty is not a two-way street.

Major Donor Admits Hiring Prostitute to Smear Witness
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/19/nyregion/major-donor-admits-hiring-prostitute-to-smear-witness.html

Christ, what a sewer these so-called upstanding citizens live in.

[Sam Peralta]

"I am convinced that it was always intended to be a set-up; an entrapment."

Seems that way considering the language of Goldstone's initial email.

[English Outsider]

David Habakkuk - sometimes a phrase jumps out at you and you say "That's it". Yours is such a phrase - "It is part of the 'new Brezhnevism' which has taken over both in the United States and Western Europe." We're marking time, aren't we, at least in Europe, while the ancien regime gets ready to lumber out of the way. How long - years, decades? And what horrors will replace it, or do we have it in us to transition to something better?

Babak - "Love of Israel"? You see more than I do but in this case I must confess that I don't see it your way at all. I've just been hearing from a friend who lives close by some "Schlagende Verbindungen" - a type of student fraternity - in Germany. When drunk they sing the Horst Wessel lied and get banned from the local beer houses as a result. Nice tune but the words are iffy. The students will go on, some of them, to run German industry and they'll be influential. In some small towns and villages in the former East Germany you'll find entire communities of cradle Nazis just as you'll find them in Croatia or the Ukraine. West German progressives move there sometimes because property's cheap; and sometimes, I gather, move out again pretty quickly. None of these groups could fairly be described as philo-semitic.

Nor could that many in France or in Eastern Europe. I'd hazard a guess that you'd really only find philo-semitism in the English speaking countries of the West, and that's wearing a bit thin because we're becoming more aware of the Israelis' propensity for beating up on the locals.

So "Love of Israel" might not be as strong this side of the Diocletian line as it maybe was. My view, as we've discussed before, is that the Israelis would do well to take their winnings while they're still ahead.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Thank you for your comments with which I must disagree. One only needs to look at the political economic and military posture of Fortress West to surmise its deep love and affection for Israel; e.g. Germany supplying weapons to Israel for free, France furnishing them with all they needed to build nuclear weapons...
LET US NOT KID OURSELVES HERE.

[English Outsider]

Babak - I've seen no reliable data on popular support for Israel in the West and don't know if there is any such data. As for Western Government support you know more about that than I can. I'm an optimist and like to believe that what we think does eventually influence what our politicians do but I accept that the facts are against me at present on that so I defer to your opinion.

The thing is that I don't believe it's safe for any country to be so dependant for its very existence on what people or politicians in other countries think of them or do for them. That's even more the case for a country founded on incomplete ethnic cleansing and located in an area where half a billion of the surrounding peoples are either hostile to them, indifferent to them, or whose governments are merely co-operating with them for short term advantage.

Putting all considerations of fairness on one side the fact is that the Israelis are there and aren't going to be not there without a further round of ethnic cleansing just as horrifying as the original round. Do any of us want to see that? I don't and nor does anyone else. Therefore some way has to be found of ensuring that they can stay there safely.

At present they're on the crest of a wave and the existence of the country is secured by the support of the West, in particular by the overwhelming military and diplomatic power of the United States. I've argued, maybe incorrectly, that that American support is at root guaranteed by the lock on the American electoral process exercised by the American pro-Israel religious groups: those fundamentalists, Evangelicals and Mormons for whom the existence of Israel is a doctrinal imperative. But even if I'm right that's a pretty fragile lock. Just take the American religious fundamentalists and look at how their doctrinal imperatives have shifted over the last hundred years or so. We think of fundamentalist beliefs as unalterable but of course they're not. Lacking a formal hierarchical structure, and therefore lacking the inertia such a structure provides, they're even more subject to sudden shifts. Relying on the electoral weight afforded by such a constituency cannot guarantee long term security for Israel.

And if I'm wrong and the Christian Zionists aren't the determining factor, then the guarantee of American support for Israel is even more fragile. What does it depend on then? A powerful lobby and the fact that many American politicians see Israeli interests as converging with their own in the ME. A solid enough base for the short term but it's building a house upon sand to think it'll last for ever.

Therefore I reckon that the line taken by some Israelis, including as you know many senior officers of the IDF, is correct. That is, that now would be a good time for Israel to make the necessary territorial concessions and there's unlikely to be a better.

[Keith Harbaugh]

EO wrote:

But to go from there to propounding an international Jewish elite conspiracy is ridiculous. What next? The Bilderbergers? The Vatican? The Babylonians? I've even seen the Queen put forward as the kingpin of a NWO conspiracy. Such talk cuts the ground out from under your feet if ever you should wish to put forward a serious argument.

This seems like the "straw-man argument" on steroids.
EO cleverly and cunningly, I might say, uses the question "What next?"
to segue from the issued of
how much power and influence do the Jews have and
how they use that power
(with a current relevant example being Jeff Zucker)
to start babbling about "Bilderbergers", "Babylonians", and "a NWO conspiracy" (whatever that is; I have no idea).
EO, if you can't see that this is a straw-man argument,
how are we supposed to take YOU seriously?

It is also an example of a quantification error:
Just because some conspiracy theories are not valid
does not mean that all are not valid.

[English Outsider]

Keith Harbaugh - your examination of the passage you quote is correct in all respects. That passage is not a valid argument.

That is because it is not an argument. It's a bit more fancy than that. It is a subjective categorisation. With no attempt at argument or proof I place the notion that there is such an international Jewish conspiracy in the same category as the notion that the Babylonians are running the show. The passage is simply a way of saying "nonsense". And of saying what sort of nonsense I think it is.

Nor can there be any attempt at argument or proof. That's because there's no evidence advanced to argue about, or to prove right or wrong.

Lacking evidence there is only intuition to go on. Your intuition is that such a conspiracy exists. Mine is that it doesn't. We can go no further than that.

Well, we can go a little further perhaps. "Ridiculous" was a touch uncivil. Could we substitute the less confrontational word "unsubstantiated" and part more amicably than we met? By the way NWO is "New World Order". That's really heavy duty and puts the poor old international Jews in the shade. I'm not entirely sure what the NWO does, but whatever they get up to it is my devout hope that the Queen will knock them into shape one day and then we can have proper foxhunting back again.