Trump vowed ‘major speech’ on Clinton, hours after son set up Russia meeting. But meeting was a bust and speech never happened
Donald Trump Jnr confirmed ill-fated Russia meeting amid a campaign that was going ‘a million miles an hour’ - and was desperate to play catch-up to Clinton
It was June 7, 2016, and Donald Trump stood on the stage at his Westchester County, New York, golf club to launch his general election race against Hillary Clinton with a big promise.
“I am going to give a major speech,” Trump declared, before his gaze drifted away from the prepared remarks on the teleprompter at the close of an unusually subdued primary election-night speech. “Probably Monday of next week. And we’re going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons.
“I think you’re going to find it very informative and very, very interesting,” he added. He promised to detail her “corrupt dealings”, including with “the Russians”.
Just hours earlier, his son Donald Trump Jnr had hit send on an email confirming a meeting with a lawyer with alleged ties to the Russian government who had promised him damaging information about Hillary Clinton.
The meeting occurred two days later on June 9 in Trump Tower, attended by Trump’s chief strategist Paul Manafort and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. But it was a disappointment, according to Trump Jr, who said this week that the Russians didn’t have what they promised.
And the major speech about the Clintons that Trump promised never materialised.
The two events, just hours apart, are now part of a ballooning controversy over the Russians’ efforts to intervene in the 2016 election and investigations by an FBI special counsel and Congress into whether Trump campaign associates might have colluded with them. They also highlight the freewheeling nature of the Trump campaign, which at that moment found itself unprepared and underfinanced to face Clinton’s machine-like campaign in the general election.
In an interview on Wednesday, Trump denied that he knew about his son’s meeting with the Russian lawyer until recent days, but he defended Trump Jnr’s decision to hold it.
In early June of last year, Trump and his children were itching for a fight with Clinton but had little in the way of experienced political hands with clout to navigate the complexities of a general-election presidential contest. Some Trump associates say Trump Jnr was responding to a real need within the campaign to catch up with Clinton - and fast.
“You always take those meetings because you never know when someone will come in with something that’s a game-changer, especially with this campaign that didn’t have a research operation,” said one former Trump campaign adviser still in touch with the White House who, like several others interviewed for this story, requested anonymity in order to speak candidly. “They were so desperate for research that they would meet with anyone.”
The day of Trump Jnr’s meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer with alleged ties to the Kremlin, was a busy one on the campaign trail. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus had arrived in New York to join Manafort at a meeting of major GOP donors at Trump Tower aimed at jump-starting the campaign’s general election fundraising efforts as they pushed to catch up with Clinton.
It’s just like him to go off half-cocked and make an announcement in anticipation that he’s going to have some info that he doesn’t have yet
At the same time, Trump faced the prospect of an open revolt at the Republican National Convention and a fierce fight for delegates at state conventions. Meanwhile, his public poll numbers were in a free fall from nearly 43 per cent at the beginning of June to 38 per cent a couple weeks later. Before the end of the month, Trump fired campaign manager Corey Lewandowski - and elevated Manafort - as his children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jnr, flexed their power.
The Clinton campaign, on the other hand, was flush with cash and preparing to tout the endorsement of then-president Barack Obama. They had finally secured the Democratic nomination and felt confident that they had settled on a strong argument against Trump.
“We were in high spirits that week,” former Clinton aide Brian Fallon recalled Wednesday.
Former Trump aides paint a picture of a campaign that - much like the Trump White House now - was consumed by shifting power dynamics. Manafort’s feud with Lewandowski had deteriorated into an “ugly” war, according to one former Trump adviser, and Trump Jnr had taken Manafort’s side.
So when the candidate’s son - who had no previous political experience - accepted the meeting at the behest of a wealthy friend and business partner, he was able to recruit serious campaign firepower to attend.
Yet, if either man had reservations about the meeting, they did nothing to keep it from occurring.
“Paul Manafort should have stopped this,” said one former Trump campaign official, but he didn’t want to anger Trump Jnr because “he was about to ascend.”
Trump Jnr explains away the meeting as a fruitless, but standard attempt by the campaign to gather damaging information on a political opponent.
“Honestly, my take-away when all of this was going on, is that someone has information on our opponent,” he told Fox News this week. “Things are going a million miles per hour.
“You know what it’s like to be on a campaign,” he added.
But according to multiple former campaign officials and observers, the Trump’s children knew very little about how campaigns were supposed to respond to offers from foreign, adversarial governments.
“I worked on a campaign in 2007 and 2008 and I was the Russia adviser to president Obama and we vetted these kinds of meetings very closely, precisely to avoid even the appearance of something like this,” said Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia. “That was my experience, that was my job. I’m not sure who did this for the Trump campaign, but that was my job.”
On the campaign trail that week and on social media, Trump had begun ramping up his attacks on Clinton, drawing attention to her “missing” emails and promising to unspool a web of corruption during her time as secretary of state.
To former Clinton aides, Trump’s promise of damaging information at the June 7 press conference takes on new meaning in light of the revelations about Trump Jnr’s meeting with Veselnitskaya.
“This one is pretty intriguing,” said Fallon. “It’s just like him to go off half-cocked and make an announcement in anticipation that he’s going to have some info that he doesn’t have yet.”
It is not clear what information Trump may have been referring to at his press conference, but Clinton campaign aides who had been girding for another Trump curveball saw the moment come and go. Trump’s aides saw it as a sign of Trump’s urge to engage with Clinton.
“My sense is that it’s what he wanted to have happen and for whatever reason it didn’t,” said Ed Brookover, former campaign adviser to Trump and former campaign manager to Ben Carson’s presidential bid. “What it showed was that he was ready to start taking on Hillary. He’d been itching to get at her.”
