re: #356 ObserverArt

Oh great…so TPM now has ‘prime’ member content. No can read.

Can you give us a quick summation Stanley?

I pay for it

Face it. The circumstantial evidence is overwhelming that Trump talked with Putin - in person and with no American witnesses - to come up with his false cover story about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting. Collusion as President. https://t.co/34kqVTwVdw

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 4, 2018

I was reminded of this this morning when Natasha Bertrand, then of Business Insider and now of The Atlantic, tweeted out a link to a piece she wrote a year ago. The gist is this. The night before the President dictated that bogus cover story about Russian adoptions he’d met privately with Vladimir Putin and discussed, by his own account, Russian adoptions!

As Bertrand notes, the fact that this meeting happened “the night before Trump reportedly crafted his son’s statement about the Trump Tower meeting raises questions about whether Putin played a role, directly or indirectly, in influencing the version of events Trump’s team relayed to the press.”

To me, though, it actually goes a bit beyond this, actually a lot beyond this. It seems all but certain that Trump knew The New York Times was about to publish a story on the Trump Tower meeting before he met with Putin. Indeed, the way the meeting came about strongly suggests he had something he felt he needed to discuss privately with Putin out of earshot of other Americans.

More details if you’re a prime member.