Potentially Illegal

Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer (June 2016): The president and his defenders have sought to portray his son’s meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower as politics-as-usual. But his son’s inbox suggests otherwise. In welcoming a visit from someone billed in email correspondence as a “Russian government attorney” with dirt on Hillary Clinton collected as part of the Kremlin’s “support for Mr. Trump,” Trump Jr. appears to have expressed openness to getting involved in the Russian government’s efforts to meddle in the American presidential election—even if, as Trump Jr. claims, Veselnitskaya ultimately didn’t deliver the promised goods. The episode doesn’t prove collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, but it constitutes the most compelling evidence to date that people in Trump’s orbit were willing to consider it. Also initially undisclosed, even as Trump Jr. admitted to meeting with the lawyer: other participants in the meeting, including a Russian American lobbyist and a Russian American businessman who had been investigated in the U.S., but never charged, for money laundering. And in taking the meeting, Trump Jr. may have run afoul of U.S. laws that prohibit political campaigns from soliciting or accepting something “of value” from foreign nationals, though there is considerable legal debate at the moment on this question.

Suspicious

Michael Flynn’s phone calls with the Russian ambassador (December 2016): When reports emerged that Trump’s incoming national-security adviser had discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador to the United States—around the same time that the Obama administration imposed sanctions against Russia in retaliation for Russian intervention in the U.S. election—some wondered whether Flynn had violated the Logan Act, an obscure and unenforced law that prohibits private citizens from conducting foreign policy without government authorization. But the most pressing questions about Flynn’s conversations didn’t revolve around the legality of his actions; instead they centered on whether he had misled U.S. officials about those conversations (for which he was eventually fired)—and whether that exposed the president’s top national-security aide to Russian blackmail.

Jared Kushner’s meeting with the Russian ambassador (December 2016): Shortly before Trump’s inauguration, Flynn and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, reportedly met with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador who would later consult with Flynn about sanctions, at Trump Tower. By Kislyak’s own account to Moscow as first reported in The Washington Post, Kushner floated the idea of establishing a communications channel between Trump’s transition team and the Russian government—and to keep the channel secret from the U.S. government by using Russian diplomatic facilities. It’s not unprecedented for incoming U.S. presidential administrations to set up back channels with foreign governments, and the channel that Kushner and Kislyak discussed seems to have never been set up. But what makes the incident suspicious is Kushner’s failure to report the contact with the Russian diplomat in his security-clearance application, and the lack of an explanation for why the Trump transition team would take such extraordinary measures. As Clint Watts, a former FBI agent, told The Atlantic, “What information would the Trump team want to make sure is hidden from U.S. intelligence? The idea of using Russian facilities to skirt Russian surveillance in the U.S. would either be a serious attempt to hide something or the actions of a young amateur.”