.. A senior Russian official who claimed to be acting at the behest of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia tried in May 2016 to arrange a meeting between Mr. Putin and Donald J. Trump
.. An advocate for Christian causes emailed campaign aides saying that Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of the Russian central bank who has been linked both to Russia’s security services and organized crime, had proposed a meeting between Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump. The subject line of the email, turned over to Senate investigators, read, “Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite,” according to one person who has seen the message.
Mr. Torshin has established ties to Russia’s security establishment. He served in the upper house of the Russian Parliament and also sat on the country’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee, a separate government council that includes the director of the Federal Security Service, known as F.S.B., and the ministers of defense, interior and foreign affairs.
.. Spanish investigators claim Mr. Torshin laundered money for the Russian mob through Spanish banks and properties while he was in Parliament.
Donald Trump Jr. Exchanged Messages With WikiLeaks
The messages, seen in an email, mark the first evidence of direct contact between senior Trump campaign officials and the leak-spilling website
.. Donald Trump Jr. was in communication during the 2016 campaign with WikiLeaks, the online operation that last year published a trove of damaging Democratic emails that the U.S. intelligence community concluded were stolen by Russian hackers, according to an email obtained by The Wall Street Journal.
On Sept. 20, 2016, WikiLeaks contacted the son of President Donald Trump through a direct message on Twitter to advise him about the pending launch of a website that would highlight ties between the elder Mr. Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to the email.
“A PAC run, anti-Trump site putintrump.org is about to launch,” WikiLeaks warned the younger Mr. Trump, who was a top campaign adviser to his father.
The WikiLeaks message told him it had “guessed the password” behind the website, and asked Mr. Trump Jr.: “Any comments?”
.. He subsequently forwarded the email to top campaign aides, including then-campaign chief executive Steve Bannon, campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, senior adviser Jared Kushner and digital director Brad Parscale, according to the email viewed by The Journal.
“Do you know the people mentioned and what the conspiracy they are looking for could be?,” he asked the group.
.. The exchange—which was first reported by the Atlantic on Monday and is part of a collection of documents turned over to congressional investigators by the younger Mr. Trump’s lawyers—marks the first evidence of direct contact between senior Trump campaign officials and the Sweden-based WikiLeaks.
.. On Oct. 3, 2016, WikiLeaks asked him to “comment on/push” a quote by Mrs. Clinton saying she wanted to “Just drone” Mr. Assange.
“Already did that earlier today. It’s amazing what she can get away with,” the president’s son responded.
.. On Oct. 12, 2016, WikiLeaks said it was “great to see you and your dad talking about our publications” and suggested a link for the elder Mr. Trump to tweet if he were to mention the website, according to the Atlantic.
Fifteen minutes later, the elder Mr. Trump tweeted: “Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information provided by WikiLeaks. So dishonest! Rigged system!”
He didn’t include the suggested link but his son tweeted it out two days later. “For those who have the time to read about all the corruption and hypocrisy all the @wikileaks emails are right here: http://wlsearch.tk/,” the younger Mr. Trump wrote.
A Second Fusion GPS Dossier Implicated Clinton Foundation Donors
(a) The Russians do not understand American political campaigns well enough to appreciate that alleged misconduct by a donor does not hurt a candidate if the candidate is not complicit in the misconduct; (b) the Putin regime attempted (unsuccessfully) to lure the Trump campaign into its anti–Magnitsky Act effort by convincing Don Trump Jr. and other campaign officials that there was a useful anti-Clinton angle to be exploited; and (c) the Putin regime calculated that, simply by taking a meeting with a Kremlin emissary on the promise of damaging information about Clinton, the Trump campaign would foolishly expose itself to blackmail by Putin.
.. We can easily infer why the Trump campaign concluded Veselnitskaya’s information was useless. We do not know what it is about the Ziff family’s dealings with Browder that the Russians believed amounted to — or could be spun as — tax-law violations. But the Trump officials, who were under the impression they would be receiving information that incriminated Clinton herself, would have realized instantly that alleged misconduct by Clinton Foundation donors would be irrelevant to the campaign if it did not directly involve Clinton.
.. Fusion’s dossier about Clinton Foundation donors was never used in the campaign. Neither was Fusion’s dossier about Donald Trump — the one compiled for Fusion by former British spy Christopher Steele and later described by then–FBI director James Comey as “salacious and unverified.”
For all the talk about “Trump collusion with Russia,” it seems increasingly clear that the Kremlin, as is its wont, hoped to undermine the United States government regardless of which party won the White House in 2016. Wittingly or not, Fusion GPS helped the Putin regime play both sides.
Former U.S. intelligence officials: Trump being ‘played’ by Putin
“By not confronting the issue directly and not acknowledging to Putin that we know you’re responsible for this, I think he’s giving Putin a pass,” former CIA director John Brennan said
.. I think it demonstrates to Mr. Putin that Donald Trump can be played by foreign leaders who are going to appeal to his ego and try to play upon his insecurities, which is very, very worrisome from a national security standpoint.”
.. “He seems very susceptible to rolling out the red carpet and honor guards and all the trappings and pomp and circumstance that come with the office, and I think that appeals to him, and I think it plays to his insecurities,” Clapper said.
.. “I don’t know why the ambiguity about this,” Brennan said. “Putin is committed to undermining our system, our democracy and our whole process. And to try paint it in any other way is, I think, astounding, and, in fact, poses a peril to this country.”
.. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin came to Trump’s defense, brushing aside the comments of Brennan and Clapper.
“Those were the most ridiculous statements,” Mnuchin said. “President Trump is not getting played by anybody.”
.. Marc Short, Trump’s director of legislative affairs, said Sunday that the president does concur with a January 2017 assessment by the intelligence community about Russian meddling... “He believes that after a year of investigations of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, there is zero evidence of any ballot being impacted by Russian interference,”