A bungling Bond: Trump-Russian meeting was so botched many smell a setup

D) All of the above.

If you answered, “No,” to any of these questions, you’re no Rob Goldstone. He’s the globe-trotting, celebrity-schmoozing music impresario who set up a now-infamous encounter between the Trump campaign and a Russian lawyer, and made little effort to hide it.

His modus operandi was so overt, so obvious, that it’s provoked head-scratching and stoked conspiracy theories. Some of the president’s defenders say this had to be a setup, perhaps by Democrats.

Alternatively, others simply dismiss the whole thing as a non-story, for different reasons: there’s no evidence the meeting yielded anything, denials of any Kremlin ties, and indications that Democrats have also picked up political tips from foreigners.

But some friends of the British-born music agent were left with the impression he’d been helpful to Donald Trump’s election.

While Goldstone’s wide-open Facebook page usually shows pictures of celebrity acquaintances like Michael Jackson and Robert De Niro, and shots of his constant travels, it did get political last Nov. 8 — the night Trump was elected.

Goldstone posted: ”Pennsylvania about to be called which would give presidency to Trump.” In another, he showed a picture of himself, Trump, and a mutual friend captioned: ”The A-Team — headed to the White House.”

Some friends were annoyed.

One swore at Goldstone and posted the message: ”You helped this disaster happen when you know what an idiot (Trump) is. Please forget who I am. We should never have become friends.”

This was a few months after the now-notorious meeting Goldstone set up at Trump Tower involving Donald Trump Jr., campaign manager Paul Manafort, and presidential staffer-and-son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Goldstone marked a geotag for the visit and posted it on his Facebook page.

Email records show he presented the meeting as an opportunity to get information collected by the Russian government. He said the information was dirt on Hillary Clinton gathered in a bid to help Donald Trump, and sent his way via Russian prosecutor and it would be shared at Trump Tower by someone he called a Russian government lawyer.

The lawyer in question has denied links to the Kremlin; the Trump team says the meeting was a bust; and the president’s fans are dismissing the episode, alternatively, as a non-story, or evidence of a double-standard against Trump, or a Democratic setup.

But Donald Trump Jr. was excited because he replied to Goldstone: “I love it.”

An emerging theme on the right is that this was a setup. Some are pointing out that the Russian lawyer posted an anti-Trump social-media message last year, and appeared at a congressional hearing to watch Barack Obama’s Russia ambassador testify.

A congressional Republican, Chuck Grassley, has sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security asking why she was allowed in the country when her permission to travel to the U.S. had expired in early 2016.

The farther fringes of the alt-right suggested she may have been sent in to wiretap Trump Tower.

The more mainstream right appeared to be coalescing around a more mundane line of response: that the whole thing is a yawn-inducing nothingburger — that people close to the Clinton campaign also reached out to Ukraine or Russia for political dirt.

But one Obama White House veteran agrees this looks like a conspiracy — just not the kind Trump’s fans have in mind. Brett Bruen studied Russian influence operations for Obama’s National Security Council following the invasion of Ukraine.

He said this resembles a move from the Russian playbook. He calls it the “rope-a-dope” strategy. Often, he says, the rope is a friendly, innocuous-seeming middleman, encouraged to pull a target into conversation.

“What at first glance may seem like a fairly amateurish operation and a cast of comedic characters actually is rooted in a much more sophisticated strategy by Russian intelligence to probe a campaign, and see where there may be opportunities or weaknesses that can be exploited,” Bruen said in an interview.

“You never come out in a (first) meeting with a potential contact, or in the intelligence world a ‘source’, and put your best cards on the table… They wanted to see whether or not there was a willingness on the part of key members of the Trump campaign to take these kinds of meetings, to be baited.”

Alexander Panetta, The Canadian Press

by Canadian Press

A bungling Bond: Trump-Russian meeting was so botched many smell a setup

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