meetings with the trumps? for the same person. for this attorney. goldstone says he didn t actively pursue it. and the story of the trump tower meeting might have stayed hidden. if not for the work of some investigative reporters. jill becker was part of a team at the new york times who noticed something interesting in jared kushner s updated security clearance forms. on this learned list of contacts, and now, he gave the fbi, he wrote that natalia veselnitskaya, that was it and paul manafort the campaign chairman had separately had to disclose that he had met with some russian official i think he had put it at the request of don jr. so we were able to kind of piece this together and at least paul manafort and the president s son had met with this person in the midst of a campaign, to discuss what? the times reporters reached
russia has come to see me. i thought that was hilarious. at the time, i think aras was the 54th richest man in russia. he sounds sort of giddy about the whole thing. i suppose at the time i thought he was making a fun ss them. he was trying to make them feel welcome, which he did. goldstone says while celebrating the pageant deal during dinner, the conversation took an off of color turn. he said to emen something along the lines of, i ll take a million dollars off the cost of this pageant right now if you tell me if you ve ever slept with any of the contestants. and he said this smiling. and emen went, interesting. and then he smiled, and he said, mr. trump, i ll increase the fee by $5 million if you tell me if you ve ever slept with any contestant. and everybody laughed. but i thought, hmm, this is kind of like a match made in frat boy
it began with an offer for dirt, and by many accounts, ended up as a frustrating 20-minute conversation about sanctions and adoptions. so what were the russians up to? the man who set it up has a theory. so do you agree with national security officials both prior and current who believe that this meeting was a probe set up by the russian government, of the trump campaign? i have always looked at it as a bait and switch. goldstone says he thinks the offer of incriminating information was made just to get in the room. but it was a dirty offer. yes. it was a dirty offer that they accepted. yes. that is true. that didn t materialize. but yes. it s the willingness to accept it. that willingness, intelligence experts says, may have been the whole point. a lot of my sources, currents and former intelligence official, believe that this
from the russia side, those are the people you would go to. according to goldstone, during their call, emin said that a well-connected attorney from russia had damaging information about the democrats. i knew in my mind, when someone is saying well-connected, and you wanted a campaign meeting with trump, who else are they connected to? it is obviously the government, in my mind. so i was taken aback, first because emin and i, we worked together maybe three-plus years, had never even had a conversation about politics. we had conversation about donald trump but not about politics. and in donald trump, goldstone admits, he saw opportunities that had little to do with government. selfishly, i thought if donald trump is elected president, that s amazing. there s lots of favors we could ask, i would like emin to play at the inauguration, i would like to do a photo shoot with emin in the white house, those
what the russians were up to. two nights before the meeting, on june 7, trump greeted supporters with what now sounds like a curious promise. we are 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. we just don t know if the speech that donald trump made is a coincidence or not. and so the timing seems awfully strange. for all of the attention the trump tower meeting would later get, goldstone says at the time, he hardly gave it a second thought. i didn t care about the meeting. it sounds bad. but it s true. i didn t care. i wanted my client to be happy. that s always my ultimate goal. coming up, so tell us what happened, was the dirt on the democratic party and hillary clinton forthcoming?