Julia Ioffe, formerly with The Atlantic and now writing for GQ, has a new profile online of Donald Trump Jr. that aims to give some insight into what drives the president's first born.
It contains some interesting passages about the pathology behind Don Jr.'s behavior (if one is interested in knowing more), but it also includes a section about Don Jr.'s connection to Russia and some new details about the now infamous June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya and others during the 2016 campaign.
GQ:
As Don peddled his father's business ventures around the world, he came into plenty of contact with Russians. “In terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets, say, in Dubai and certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York,” he said at an industry conference in 2008. (The Trump SoHo project, which he developed with [Felix] Sater, ended up being sued for fraud, resulting in a settlement.) “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
Don repeatedly tried to develop Trump properties in Russia, but despite the country's lucrative oil boom—and the gilded dovetailing of Trump and Russian aesthetics—he couldn't quite manage Moscow and its corruption. “It is a question of who knows who, whose brother is paying off who, et cetera,” he said after making half a dozen trips there in a year and a half. “It really is a scary place.”
The most infamous of his failed Russian deals—the one that backfired monumentally and now may imperil his father's presidency—had nothing to do with real estate. In June 2016, when a set of Russians with oblique ties to the Kremlin reached out to Don through an intermediary promising damaging information on Hillary Clinton that “would be very useful to your father,” Junior couldn't have been more curious. “If it's what you say,” Don infamously wrote back to them, “I love it.”
According to evidence and testimony released by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Don next made a few calls, a couple to Russia and a couple to a blocked number. (Investigators pointed out that Donald Trump Sr. uses a blocked number.) Don then set up a meeting at Trump Tower with the Russians, one of whom—lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya—was said to be connected to the Russian prosecutor general, an old ally of Vladimir Putin.
And so on June 9, 2016, Don—along with his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort—began a fateful confab in a conference room in Trump Tower. According to a person who was there, after some pleasantries about the view of Central Park, Don got straight to it.
“So I believe you have some information for us?” he asked. Veselnitskaya began reading from prepared remarks about DNC donors the Ziff brothers, their alleged tax evasion, and the connection she saw between them and Putin critic Bill Browder. According to testimony, Don tried to get the conversation back on track. “ ‘So can you show us how does this money go to Hillary?’ ” two of the participants recall him asking. Veselnitskaya shot back, “Why don't you do your own research on her? We gave you the idea.”
According to one of the participants in the meeting, Don began to realize he wasn't going to be handed what he was hoping for. “The light just went out in his eyes,” the participant told me recently. “He was totally disinterested.”
Veselnitskaya then went into a long, tangled exposition about the Magnitsky Act and the adoption of Russian children, but it seemed like the two sides were now talking past each other, says the participant. Manafort seemed to fall asleep. Kushner grew agitated, asked why they were talking about adoptions, and left. According to the meeting participant, Don recognized that things had turned futile—but offered to stay in touch. The participant said Don had a parting message for the Russians: “ ‘When we win’—he said when, not if—‘when we win, come back and see us again.’ ”
That meeting, which Don had hoped would prove useful, has since become as useful as a hole in the head. It is now a prime focus of the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller into potential collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.
“I think he regrets taking the meeting,” a source close to Don told me. “Does he regret it because he thinks he did something wrong? No. He regrets it because it ended up causing a situation that wasted a lot of time and money.”
The New York Times recently reported that Don also met with an Israeli and an emissary from two Arab princes seeking to help his father win the election.
“Maybe he's not an intellectual, but he tried to be useful for his family,” the participant from the Russia meeting told me. “I feel bad for him, honestly.”
Last fall, when Don was called before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was investigating potential links between his father's campaign and the Russian government, he seemed oblivious to the gravity of the mess he'd created. “In the breaks between the questions, he was making dumb jokes about how absurd it was that he was even there,” says a source familiar with the investigation. “He had this sense of impunity at a time when it was dangerous, when it seemed like it was the Hill that would get them.”
Instead of being wary of his questioners, Don wanted to be helpful and calmly acknowledged that he had corresponded with WikiLeaks during the election. He then happily turned the correspondence over to congressional investigators, helpful as ever. “He wasn't embarrassed to be revealing that he had exchanged DMs with WikiLeaks,” says the source, even though it was by this point abundantly clear to the American officials that WikiLeaks had links to Russian intelligence. “He's too stupid to be malicious.”
The source's impression of Don was that he, like seemingly everyone else in Trump's orbit, was uselessly trying to impress a man who can only be impressed by himself. “He's hustling and trying to do what he can to contribute but without knowing where the lines are,” the source said of Don, adding ruefully, “He's a sad and tragic figure.”
Full article: The Real Story of Donald Trump Jr. (GQ)