Authored by: Matt Palumbo

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For every supposed Russian actor that attempted to infiltrate the Trump campaign, there’s a connection back to Hillary Clinton and her sphere of influence. The infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Natalia Veselnitskaya and its backstory is exhibit-A in demonstrating that.

The meeting was brokered by publicist Rob Goldstone at the request of Aras and Emin Agalarov, a father and son duo who knew Trump through the Miss Universe pageants. It was during a 2013 Moscow trip for those pageants that Trump would stay at a Ritz-Carlton (as did the Agalarovs), which would be the location where the fictitious “golden showers” story in Christopher Steele’s dossier occurred. It’s highly likely that the “golden showers” lie originated with the Agalarovs.

Could this meeting have been just a setup?

Veselnitskaya does have connections to high ranking Russian government officials – and also to Fusion GPS, the firm that commissioned Steele’s dossier (with funding from the Hillary Clinton campaign and DNC). Veselnitskaya was working with Fusion on a project to advance Russian interests while organizing and taking part in the Trump Tower meeting – and met Fusion’s founder Glenn Simpson hours before the meeting, and for dinner the following night.

Hilariously, both maintain with a straight face that they didn’t ever discuss the Trump Tower meeting. Presumably, that’s because both realize how suspicious it looks that Fusion was simultaneously working with a Russian actor to advance Russian interests while separately trying to prove that the Trump Team was colluding with the Russians. We know that at least one man, Ed Baumgartner, worked on both cases. Baumgartner is the founder of a UK-based intelligence consultancy.

There was no real collusion – just the manufactured appearance of it.

Moving this discussion away from Trump Tower; even the Russians who lack a clear connection to Hillary were acting against Trump’s interests. Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska tends to make headlines for his past business relationship with Paul Manafort, but he has a stronger relationship to Christopher Steele’s dossier than he does to Manafort (whom he is currently suing). In the past, Deripaska was courted by former FBI director Andrew McCabe in 2009 to work on a project in Robert Mueller’s FBI. Deripaska would later play a role in sourcing for the dossier McCabe and Mueller would find themselves relying on 7 years later.

Deripaska has a connection to the source in Steele’s dossier cited as “Source D,” who is a man named Sergei Millian. Millian met with Deripaska at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum between June 16 and 18th in 2016. As reported by Chuck Ross at The Daily Caller, “Two days after the forum ended, Christopher Steele, wrote a memo based on information from an intermediary who spoke to a source later identified as Millian. Millian’s appearance at the St. Petersburg expo, photos of which he posted on Facebook, establishes for the first time that he was in Russia at the time the dossier placed him there as a source. And if Millian did indeed discuss Trump at the conference, that means Steele’s direct source was present at the conference.”

So who was that source? It only could’ve been one person: Deripaska.

Meanwhile, Mueller’s Special Counsel rages on, having found zero evidence of collusion after over a year. It’s no surprise why, when he’s looking for evidence of collusion from the wrong campaign.