June 5, 2018

A Very Brief Timeline of That Trump Tower Meeting

Is this the stupidest man in the world? Maybe!Imago via ZUMA

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

I never quite got around to writing about this, but it’s worth highlighting just how baldly and relentlessly Donald Trump has lied about Don Jr.’s meeting with a Russian attorney at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign. Here’s an abbreviated timeline:

June 2016: Don Jr. meets secretly at Trump Tower with Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya, a “trusted insider” of the Putin regime who has promised dirt on Hillary Clinton.

A year passes…

July 7, 2017: The New York Times, which has learned about the meeting, calls the White House for comment.

July 7, evening: President Trump meets in private—totally in private—with Russian president Valdimir Putin. Trump later explains that they talked about “adoptions.”

July 8: The White House releases a statement from aboard Air Force One explaining that the Trump Tower meeting was a big nothingburger that included no discussions of any substance. It was just about adoptions.

July 20: Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Trump’s legal team, quits because he’s afraid the statement amounts to obstruction of justice.

Rest of 2017: Various Trump spokespeople insist over and over that Trump himself had only recently learned about Don Jr.’s meeting and had nothing to do with the statement issued from Air Force One.

January 2018: Trump’s lawyers admit privately in a memo to Robert Mueller that Trump was not only involved in the statement, he dictated it.

June 2: The New York Times publishes the memo to Mueller, making Trump’s repeated lies public.

There’s more to the story, but it’s sometimes useful to see the bare skeleton in a single place. Whatever happened at that meeting in June 2016, Trump has spent a considerable amount of time trying to cover it up; lying about it when it was eventually discovered; and then lying some more when the lies were discovered. Maybe this is just his usual MO, but we’ve never seen it in the past because Trump was never under such intense scrutiny. Maybe. But these sure don’t seem like the actions of an innocent man, do they?

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate