Translator says there was not talk of collusion at Trump Tower meeting

Mark Hemingway:

Just days after news of the infamous Trump Tower meeting drew the attention of 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.” The agent notes also state, “There was no smoking gun according to Samochornov. There was not a discussion about ‘dirt’ on Hillary Clinton. Samochornov did not think Hillary Clinton was mentioned by name.”
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The contents of Samochornov’s “302” – the form used by the FBI to report and summarize agent interviews – were first flagged this month by “Undercover Huber,” a pseudonymous Twitter account dedicated to following Trump-Russia news (not to be confused with Justice Department official John Huber, who was tasked with investigating potential FBI misconduct during the 2016 election). The document, with agents’ names redacted, was posted by the FBI under a federal judge’s order to release on a monthly basis 302s underpinning the Mueller Report, following a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by CNN and BuzzFeed.

Samochornov told the FBI that Veselnitskaya had dangled one piece of potentially partisan political information before the Trump officials – the claim that business associates of William Browder, the American businessman behind the passage of the Magnitsky Act, had made illicit donations to Democratic campaigns. Interview notes state that “Samochornov did not know if the donation(s) were made directly to the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, or a political action committee.”

This allegation, which was trumpeted by Russian President Vladimir Putin, was false. In November of 2017, Reuters reported that Fusion GPS – the Washington, D.C., opposition research firm paid by the Clinton campaign to compile the debunked Steele “dossier” used by the FBI to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign – had provided Veselnitskaya with the bogus Browder-connected dirt before the Trump Tower meeting
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Fusion denied the allegation.  However, the bottom line is that there was no talk of Russian collusion at the meeting and nothing ever came from it.  The meeting was certainly suspicious but not for the reasons alleged by Democrats in the media.  It was suspicious because of the connections with Fusion by the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya.  It was also suspicious because the Mueller team failed to disclose the exculpatory nature of the conversation,