A Washington Post accounting of all the people in President Trump's orbit who knew the Russians were peddling dirt on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign says the number is at least six. A chronological analysis tracks the Russian outreach beginning in March 2016 and draws the following conclusion:
So we are confident the following people were offered or told about information allegedly incriminating Clinton:
It is possible that the following other people knew about or received similar offers, too:
- Stephen Miller
- Carter Page
- J.D. Gordon (if Page was offered dirt)
- Donald Trump
Trump’s argument has long been that there was no collusion between his campaign and the Russian government. That claim increasingly depends on how one defines “collusion.”
The connections between Trump associates and Russian nationals or agents we know about for sure began in March 2016.
March 2016:
Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos was told by a London-based professor named Joseph Mifsud that the Russians had dirt on Clinton in the form of emails.
May 2016:
[A] former member of the Russian parliament named Aleksandr Torshin made repeated efforts to contact Donald Trump Jr., the candidate’s son. He sent multiple emails hoping to set up a meeting with Trump Jr. when both were at a National Rifle Association convention in Kentucky. The two met briefly at a dinner associated with that event.
Late May:
A man calling himself Henry Greenberg approached [Roger] Stone about having unspecified dirt on Clinton. Stone met with Greenberg, who asked for money in exchange for the alleged dirt. Stone was not part of the campaign in 2016, but had been connected to Greenberg (who also used the name Henry Oknyansky) by campaign official Michael Caputo.
June 9, 2016:
This is the infamous Trump Tower meeting. Emin Agalarov, a pop star and developer in Moscow, asked his associate Rob Goldstone to reach out to Trump Jr. to pitch a meeting in which dirt on Clinton would be shared, courtesy of Agalarov’s intervention. (“If it’s what you say I love it,” Trump Jr. replied.) The meeting, centered on a Kremlin-connected lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya, took place at Trump Tower in early June.
July 2016:
Trump campaign adviser Carter Page traveled to Russia to give a speech. On his return, he emailed Trump campaign staffer J.D. Gordon, offering to share “incredible insights and outreach I’ve received from a few Russian legislators and senior members of the Presidential administration here.”
(...)
[T]he controversial dossier of reports compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele includes a report from mid-July alleging that Page met with a Russian official who “rais[ed] a dossier of ‘kompromat’ ” — compromising material — “the Kremlin possessed on TRUMP’s Democratic presidential rival, Hillary CLINTON, and its possible release to the Republican’s campaign team.”
Also July:
In July — as Page was in Moscow — [Paul] Manafort emailed [Konstantin] Kilimnik to offer private campaign briefings to oligarch Oleg Deripaska, for whom Manafort had done consulting work for years. Kilimnik is believed to have ties to Russian intelligence.
August 2016:
Stone took up another cause: denying that the release of material stolen from the DNC the prior month was a function of the Russian government. He wrote an article for Breitbart placing the blame instead on someone calling himself “Guccifer 2.0″ who released several documents from the cache of stolen documents in June. Guccifer then reached out to Stone on Twitter; the two carried on a brief exchange.
Guccifer 2.0 is now believed to have been a Russian intelligence officer, based on a slip-up in his efforts to anonymize his identity.
September 2016:
Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks exchanged private messages on Twitter. None of those messages suggest Trump Jr. and the organization coordinated the released of information damaging to Clinton. But the exchange occurred shortly before WikiLeaks began releasing the emails stolen from Podesta in early October.