Business card aficionado Donald Trump, Jr. hosted not five, not six, not seven, but eight people at his office in Trump Tower last summer for a meeting that looks more collude-y by the day. Well, the number's eight for now, anyway. It used to be just four, and before that it was zero. We learned Tuesday that number eight on the guest list was Ike Kaveladze, an American-based employee of a Russian real estate company owned by Aras Agalarov, a Kremlin-linked oligarch who partnered with the Trumps to bring the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow.

For some reason, Don the Younger didn't want us to know Kaveladze was there—along with pretty much anything else about The Russian Rendezvous. After all, it was a long, winding road to get to this point in his tale. Along the way, Junior and various other Trumpworld equivocators have repeatedly, reflexively lied about or misrepresented that June 9, 2016, meeting. They lied about the existence of the meeting, they lied about the reason for it, they lied about who was there, and they followed all that up by offering every excuse under the sun to try to explain the whole thing away. It's worth taking a look back at all the ways that the Trump Team has misled the public about a powwow they still say anyone in politics would have attended.

July 24, 2016: "Anything to Win"

As Wikileaks began releasing hacked emails from the DNC and Clinton's campaign began making noises about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, Don Jr. joined CNN's Jake Tapper to dismiss the whole business as a desperate ploy from people who would "lie or say anything to win."

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He continued:

"I don't mind a fair fight, Jake. But these lies, and the perpetuating of that kind of nonsense to try to gain some kind of political capital, is just outrageous, and he should be ashamed of himself. If a Republican did that, they'd be calling to bring out the electric chair."

This would all get a thick coat of irony about a year later when we learned Junior's Russia meeting occurred the month before this sit-down with Tapper.

What was that about lying and doing anything to win?

December 18, 2016: Kellyanne Conway's Blanket Denial

Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway has never been a good source for information. Back in December, as we learned more about the extent of Russian interference in the election, Face the Nation's John Dickerson asked Conway outright if there was any contact during the campaign between members of the Trump campaign and Russian officials:

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Notice it's not just a denial of collusion—it's a denial of any contact at all. This has been shown, again and again, to be completely and thoroughly false. There's the Trump Jr. meeting, which also included then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Son-in-Law-in-Chief Jared Kushner. But Kushner was also involved in various meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and, separately, a Russian banker, which he then failed to report on his security clearance application forms. Kushner has since amended those multiple times—after a visit from the FBI—to include more than 100 meetings with foreign contacts. Michael Flynn was fired for an extracurricular conversation with Kislyak, while Attorney General Jeff Sessions also appeared to lie about having met with the ambassador during his confirmation hearings. That, like Kushner's conspicuous omissions, would seem to constitute a felony, but nothing has come of it.

This episode, like Junior's, came back to Conway in a big way this month.

January 11, 2017: The President-elect

Trump the Elder was asked the following during his bizarre pre-inauguration press conference: "Can you stand here today, once and for all, and say that no one connected to you or your campaign had any contact with Russia leading up to or during the presidential campaign?" Trump demurred, but when two reporters followed him to the elevator afterwards, he seemed to offer a flat denial:

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Fortunately ABC's Cecilia Vega asked my question about whether any Trump associates contacted Russians. Trump said no. — Jim Acosta (@Acosta) January 11, 2017

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?? @DavidGroff you must have missed the part of my reporting that said trump came back and answered my first question with a firm "no." https://t.co/oacERpf7fG — Cecilia Vega (@CeciliaVega) January 12, 2017

Again, the claim was that there were no contacts of any kind. Period.

January 15, 2017: The Vice President-elect

But why let Conway and the president have all the fun? Vice President-elect Mike Pence offered his own blanket denial shortly before his own inauguration:

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Jan. 15: Pence denies Trump campaign talked to Russia at all. (video)



July 9: NYT says Trump Jr met w Russian to get damaging Clinton info. pic.twitter.com/2bJSubsMo7 — Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) July 9, 2017

To reiterate, these administration figures insisted that no member of the Trump campaign met with any Russian officials during the campaign, in any capacity. (One of Trump's closest aides, Hope Hicks, also offered a blanket denial way back on November 11.) This was not true, and we haven't even broached the subject of whether those contacts were part of an effort to collude. We're a long way from the eight-deep meeting in Trump Tower, but we'll get there.

March 18, 2017: The Stump

In a New York Times profile that featured the presidential scion struggling to find a comfortable stump to sit on, Don Jr. also denied participating in any campaign-related meetings with Russians:

"Did I meet with people that were Russian? I'm sure, I'm sure I did. But none that were set up. None that I can think of at the moment. And certainly none that I was representing the campaign in any way, shape or form."

This, suffice it to say, was not true either.

July 8, 2017: Adoption

The New York Times first reported Junior set up a meeting with a Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, during the campaign. This contradicted Trump Jr.'s prior statement on March 18, and brought a statement from him in response:

It was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up.

I was asked to attend the meeting by an acquaintance, but was not told the name of the person I would be meeting with beforehand.

So he did meet with Russians in a campaign capacity, and he brought along two senior campaign officials. That's not what he said in March! But it was just about adopting Russian children. Nothing to see here.

July 9, 2017: The Dirt

The Times followed up with the revelation that Junior attended the meeting because he was promised damaging information on his father's opponent, Hillary Clinton, in advance. So it wasn't just about adoption, Don?

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Junior's new defense was that the lawyer's "statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information." Then, Trump, Jr. says, Veselnitskaya switched the topic to adoption.

But the scion openly admitted that the offer of dirt on Hillary Clinton was "the pretext" of the meeting—that is to say, it's why he attended. His defense, now, was that none of the information was useful, and that he didn't know the lawyer's name beforehand—an attempt to imply he didn't really know who she was.

July 10-11, 2017: The Kremlin Connection

The Times came for Junior again, but only after he attempted a bizarre bit of digital seppuku by tweeting out a series of emails that blatantly showed he knew not only that the lawyer was connected to the Kremlin, but that the whole deal was part of a Russian government effort to interfere in the United States presidential election on his father's behalf.

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Here's my statement and the full email chain pic.twitter.com/x050r5n5LQ — Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 11, 2017

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Here is page 4 (which did not post due to space constraints). pic.twitter.com/z1Xi4nr2gq — Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 11, 2017

As the Times highlighted, when told a "Russian government lawyer" had dirt on Clinton as part of a Russian government operation, Junior responded, "I love it." He agreed to the meeting, looped Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort into the email chain, and they all went. At this point, we're quite far away from Trumpworld's earlier guarantees that there were "no contacts" of any kind between campaign members and Russian officials. We're quite far away from adoption. And yet, Junior essentially went with the excuse that because the lawyer hadn't provided any useful information, there was nothing to see here. That is to say: I tried to collude, but she didn't come up with the goods.

To put things over the top, Trump, Jr. claimed to be releasing the emails "in order to be totally transparent." Yet the Times' deputy managing editor, Clifford Levy, said that Trump the Younger only released the emails after the Times had obtained them and reached out to Trump, Jr. for comment on them. His team asked for time to respond, then released the emails themselves:

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.@DonaldJTrumpJr posted these emails after being informed that The New York Times was doing a story on them https://t.co/CgdD1xUIgt https://t.co/3SQWSccyZC — Cliff Levy (@cliffordlevy) July 11, 2017

So even the transparency was a transparent sham.

That night, Junior went to the safe space of Sean Hannity's Fox News show to try to dig himself out of the hole that was getting deeper by the day. He kept up the "transparency" shtick, and ran through a litany of other excuses—some of which didn't exactly complement one another—to explain it all away:

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So he didn't know any better, and he didn't get any dirt, and what about Hillary?

July 13, 2017: Trump the Elder Backs the Younger

At a press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron, the president defended his son, saying, "I think from a practical standpoint, most people would have taken that meeting." He continued, via report in Politico:

But the president echoed his son and his administration's top aides, framing such information as simply "opposition research" into a political opponent anddownplaying the significance of his son's meeting with someone from Russia, which the U.S. intelligence community has said meddled in the 2016 campaign to boost Trump over Clinton.

"I have only been in politics for two years, but I've had many people call up: 'Oh, gee, we have information on this factor or this person or, frankly, Hillary,'" Trump said. "That's very standard in politics. Politics is not the nicest business in the world. But it's very standard where they have information and you take the information."

Of course, no one else thinks this is at all standard. Even one of the Fox News judges said it stinks to high heaven. (The other said she would "take the first trolley to Hell" to get opposition research from The Devil Himself. So...yeah.) The president later added that the meeting was quick, that Kushner left early, and that Manafort wasn't even really paying attention, OK? Then he said it was Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch's fault that Veselnitskaya was allowed in the country, even though his son then took a meeting with the person whom he said shouldn't have been allowed in the country on the pretext that that person would provide dirt as part of a Russian government op. So there's that.

Trump also took to Twitter the next day:

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HillaryClinton can illegally get the questions to the Debate & delete 33,000 emails but my son Don is being scorned by the Fake News Media? — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 16, 2017

This oddly Shakespearean riff still makes no sense. Scorned? But Hillary!

July 15, 2017: The Fifth Person

The Associated Press reported there was a fifth person at the big rendezvous. "A prominent Russian-American lobbyist and former Soviet military officer" named Rinat Akhmetshin was also in attendance, something Akhmetshin confirmed in a statement. He reportedly has ties to Russian intelligence, but dismissed those as a "smear campaign."

Junior neglected to mention Akhmetshin stopped by, and that—at least according to Akhmetshin—the Russian lawyer, Veselnitskaya, presented Junior and Co. with "documents that detailed what she believed was the flow of illicit funds to the Democrats." The AP report continued:

Veselnitskaya presented the contents of the documents to the Trump associates and suggested that making the information public could help the campaign, he said. "This could be a good issue to expose how the DNC is accepting bad money," Akhmetshin recalled her saying. Trump Jr. asked the attorney if she had sufficient evidence to back up her claims, including whether she could demonstrate the flow of the money. But Veselnitskaya said the Trump campaign would need to research it more. After that, Trump Jr. lost interest, according to Akhmetshin.

"They couldn't wait for the meeting to end," he said. Akhmetshin said he does not know if Veselnitskaya's documents were provided by the Russian government. He said he thinks she left the materials with the Trump associates. It was unclear if she handed the documents to anyone in the room or simply left them behind, he said.

So it wasn't, according to this account, that the lawyer was "vague" or "ambiguous," as Junior claimed in his statement to the Times. She just didn't do enough of the legwork.

The same day, MSNBC reported there was a sixth person at the meeting, whom Trump, Jr. also seemed to have forgotten about. Later it emerged this person was a translator, who joined Junior, Manafort, Kushner, Veselnitskaya, Rob Goldstone (the music publicist who set it up), Akhmetshin, and the eighth attendee, who turned about to be the aforementioned Ike Kaveladze.

Originally—after denying the meeting ever happened—Junior claimed it was just him, Manafort, Kushner, and Veselnitskaya.

July 16, 2017: The Secret Service

Because all Trumpian scandals must eventually devolve into outright absurdity, the president's team at one point turned to blaming the Secret Service for Junior's rendezvous. Trump and Steve Bannon's chosen attack dog on the Russian issue, Jay Sekulow, took to the airwaves to wonder why the Secret Service didn't prevent Don the Younger from trying to collude with the agent of a foreign power:

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The only problem was that Don Jr. didn't have Secret Service protection at the point in time where he took the meeting—at least according to the Secret Service. Not that this excuse would've absolved Junior of responsibility anyway, unless you believe, as many around this mess seem to, that this 39-year-old man is "a good kid" or "a good boy."

July 17, 2017: Spicer's Folly

Because all Trumpian scandals must also involve Press Secretary Sean Spicer looking like a fool, we must conclude our tour of Junior's escapades with Spicer using a 10-day-old talking point to defend the administration. Spicer must have been left off the email chain, or maybe his boss just likes to embarrass him. But for some reason, a week after Trump, Jr. abandoned his excuse that the meeting was just about Russian adoption policy, Spicer told the assembled White House press corps that...the meeting was about adoption:

"It is quite often for people who are given information during the heat of a campaign to ask what that is, that's what simply he did. The president's made it clear through his tweet. And there was nothing, as far as we know, that would lead anyone to believe that there was anything except for a discussion about adoption and the Magnitsky Act."

First of all, what? The words, they are a salad.

Second, Junior already tweeted out the emails—that the entire world has seen, many times over, for days on end—that show he went to the meeting looking for dirt, knowing it was sourced to a Kremlin-connected official who was part of a Russian government operation to influence the campaign. Why does Spicer think it's still last Saturday? Who keeps leaving him off the emails? When will the First Lady intervene to stop this cyberbullying?

And thus did the country complete its grand journey. It began with Team Trump claiming there had been no contacts between any members of the campaign and any Russian officials. It ended with the White House press secretary using nonsense, outdated talking points, the president's lawyer blaming the Secret Service, and the president's son saying he tried to collude but didn't get anything good. What will tomorrow bring?

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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