Russian To Judgment, Con't

Yet another attempted meeting between the Trump campaign and Russia, but this is something a lot bigger: there's a new name in the mix, current Trump Deputy White House Chief of Staff Rick Dearborn, and his role in trying to arrange a meeting between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin himself.

Congressional investigators have unearthed an email from a top Trump aide that referenced a previously unreported effort to arrange a meeting last year between Trump campaign officials and Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to sources with direct knowledge of the matter. 

The aide, Rick Dearborn, who is now President Donald Trump's deputy chief of staff, sent a brief email to campaign officials last year relaying information about an individual who was seeking to connect top Trump officials with Putin, the sources said. 

The person was only identified in the email as being from "WV," which one source said was a reference to West Virginia. It's unclear who the individual is, what he or she was seeking, or whether Dearborn even acted on the request. One source said that the individual was believed to have had political connections in West Virginia, but details about the request and who initiated it remain vague. 

The same source said Dearborn in the email appeared skeptical of the requested meeting.
Sources said the email occurred in June 2016 around the time of the recently revealed Trump Tower meeting where Russians with Kremlin ties met with the president's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner as well as then-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort. 

While many details around the Dearborn email are unclear, its existence suggests the Russians may have been looking for another entry point into the Trump campaign to see if there were any willing partners as part of their effort to discredit -- and ultimately defeat -- Hillary Clinton. 

Dearborn's name has not been mentioned much as part of the Russia probe. But he served as then-Sen. Jeff Sessions' chief of staff, as well as a top policy aide on the campaign. And investigators have questions about whether he played a role in potentially arranging two meetings that occurred between the then-Russia ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, and Sessions, who has downplayed the significance of those encounters. 

Dearborn was involved in helping to arrange an April 2016 event at the Mayflower Hotel where Trump delivered a major foreign policy address, sources said. Kislyak attended the event and a reception beforehand, but it's unclear whether he interacted with Sessions there.

Yet another piece of the puzzle falls into place and remember, this is coming from the congressional investigation into Trump's Russia connections, not Mueller's investigation.  This all points the finger back to Jeff Sessions who led Trump's foreign policy campaign team in 2016.  We haven't talked too much about Sessions and his role in Trump's Russia mess, but this is likely to raise some uncomfortable new questions about that.

So who's "WV"?  The most obvious candidate is coal billionaire and recent party-switching GOP Gov. Jim Justice, who did business with Russian coal interests in West Virginia in 2015.  Justice buys the governor's seat and then stabs the Dems in the back at a Trump rally, well that's the kind of polticial opportunist with a crapload of money the Russians would love to recruit.  Whether or not Justice had access to Russian friends, well maybe somebody should be asking those questions too.

And some of those questions may be answered by the Steele Dossier.  Last week Fusion GPS president Glenn Simpson spent 10 hours testifying before Chuck Grassley and the Senate Judiciary committee, and Grassley said this week he didn't see why that testimony couldn't be released.  The Steele Dossier is the research into Trump's Russia connections, which turned up stuff so disturbing that the FBI got involved.  BuzzFeed published the dossier back in January but the caveat is that the documents weren't confirmed.

But now, seven months later, it's looking more and more like the dossier is correct: that the Russians had compromising blackmail on Trump and used it to secure his loyalty.  If Simpson's Senate testimony goes public and it backs up the validity of the Steele Dossier, that's going to be something Trump won't be able to recover from.

We'll see where this goes, but if Dearborn is being investigated, then so is Sessions.  That's pretty big.  The Steele Dossier could be even bigger.

We'll see.