Trump personally crafted son's misleading account of Russia meeting – report

President Trump personally dictated the press statement issued in the name of his eldest son that misleadingly downplayed the significance of a 2016 meeting with a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer, a new report alleged on Monday night.

The Observer view on Donald Trump’s unfitness for office | Observer editorial

According to the Washington Post, Trump personally intervened to prevent senior White House advisers from issuing a full and truthful account of the meeting on 9 June 2016 in which Donald Trump Jr, the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and then presidential campaign manager Paul Manafort came face-to-face with four Russians. One of the Russian visitors was the well-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

The report, based on multiple though largely anonymous sources that included the president’s own advisers, has the potential to cause political, and even legal, trouble for the White House because it draws Trump himself much closer into the fray over the Trump Tower meeting, which has become a lightning rod in the Russian affair.

Shunning the guidance of lawyers, and overturning the view apparently reached by Kushner and his team of advisers that a full and frank accounting should be made, Trump reportedly dictated a statement on board Air Force One as he was flying back to Washington from the G20 summit in Germany. As would soon become apparent, it gave a very partial and distorted account of events.

In the release the 2016 meeting was presented, in Trump’s own words, as “a short introductory meeting” dominated by discussion of the adoption of Russian children that was “not a campaign issue at the time”.

That statement was presented to the New York Times on 8 July, and duly included in the newspaper’s first account of the meeting. But within 24 hours, highly damaging revelations had emerged that made clear the meeting had been much more charged than that.

On 9 July, the Times revealed that Donald Jr had been lured into talking to Veselnitskaya by the promise of negative intelligence on his father’s presidential rival, Hillary Clinton, and two days after that the email chain was published that showed the younger Trump reveling in the idea of receiving dirt on the Democratic presidential candidate, uttering the gleeful phrase: “I love it”.

The Trump Tower meeting has proved to be one of the most toxic pieces of information to emerge so far in the billowing investigation into possible ties between Trump associates and Russia in the Kremlin’s efforts to skew the presidential outcome in favor of the Republican nominee. The special counsel leading the investigation, Robert Mueller, is understood to be looking closely at the event and has reportedly asked the White House to preserve all documents relating to it.

Gone in the blink of an eye: Scaramucci's glittering 10-day White House stint in full

Read more

Until now, the president managed to keep some distance from the 9 June encounter, with his lawyers claiming that he knew nothing about it. But the new report that Trump personally oversaw the issuing of a misleading account of the proceedings raises questions about the president’s role in what could be conceived as a cover-up.

It comes as Mueller has already expanded his inquiry to include the issue of whether or not Trump was engaging in a possible obstruction of justice when he fired James Comey, having tried and failed to persuade the then director of the FBI to back off investigating former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s contacts with Russian officials.

A lawyer for the president issued the Washington Post with a curt statement: “Apart from being of no consequence, the characterizations are misinformed, inaccurate, and not pertinent,” Jay Sekulow said.

The new details of the president’s role in what turned out to be a major communications fiasco come on the day that his current communications chief, Anthony Scaramucci, was dismissed from the White House after barely 11 days. The blunt removal was made on the first day of the new White House chief of staff, John Kelly, who has vowed to introduce the kind of discipline that the West Wing has been sorely lacking.

The day began shortly before 5.30am with Trump tweeting “No WH chaos!” and ended with him saying: “A great day at the White House”. But as the Washington Post’s forensic deconstruction of the framing of the Trump Tower meeting shows, the president himself has the capacity to destroy even the best-laid plans, underlining the task now facing his new chief of staff.

According to the Post, senior White House officials together with the circle around Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, had spent days rehearsing various ways to address the Trump Tower meeting publicly.

Kushner’s team was reported to have decided that it was better to “err on the side of transparency” because the whole truth would eventually come out.

President Trump, however, appeared to have seen things differently.

Since you’re here …

… we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading the Guardian than ever but advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. And unlike many news organisations, we haven’t put up a paywall – we want to keep our journalism as open as we can. So you can see why we need to ask for your help. The Guardian’s independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our perspective matters – because it might well be your perspective, too.

I appreciate there not being a paywall: it is more democratic for the media to be available for all and not a commodity to be purchased by a few. I’m happy to make a contribution so others with less means still have access to information.Thomasine F-R.

LIC Recruitment 2020


NMK

If everyone who reads our reporting, who likes it, helps to support it, our future would be much more secure.

Netherlands and UK are biggest channels for corporate tax avoidance The two countries are conduits for 37% of money heading to tax havens

Netherlands and UK are biggest channels for corporate tax avoidance
The two countries are conduits for 37% of money heading to tax havens, most of which have strong links to Britain
Daniel Boffey in Brussels
Tuesday 25 July 2017 19.07 BST
Almost 40% of corporate investments channelled away from authorities and into tax havens travel through the UK or the Netherlands , according to a study of the ownership structures of 98m firms.
The two EU states are way ahead of the rest of the world in terms of being a preferred option for corporations who want to exploit tax havens to protect their investments.
The Netherlands was a conduit for 23% of corporate investments that ended in a tax haven, a team of researchers at the University of Amsterdam concluded. The UK accounted for 14%, ahead of Switzerland (6%), Singapore (2%) and Ireland (1%).
Every year multinationals avoid paying £38bn-£158bn in taxes in the EU using tax havens. In the US, tax evasion by multinational corporations via offshore jurisdictions is estimated to be at least $130bn (£99bn) a year.
The researchers reported that there were 24 so-called “sink” offshore financial centres where foreign capital was ultimately stored, safe from the tax authorities.
Of those, 18 are said to have a current or past dependence to the UK, such as the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands and Jersey.
The tax havens used correlated heavily to which conduit country was chosen by the multinational’s accountants.
The UK is a major conduit for investments going to European countries and former members of the British Empire, such as Hong Kong, Jersey, Guernsey or Bermuda, reflecting the historical links and tax treaties enjoyed by firms setting up in Britain. The Netherlands is a principal conduit for investment ending in Cyprus and
Bermuda, among others. Switzerland is used as a conduit to Jersey. Ireland is the route for Japanese and American companies to Luxembourg.
In terms of the purpose, on paper, of the corporate structures, the Netherlands specialises in providing holding companies. The UK provides head offices and fund management and Ireland offers financial leasing and the provision of head offices.
“Our results show that offshore finance is not the exclusive business of exotic small islands far away,” the researchers write in an article for theacademic journal Scientific Reports. “Countries such as the Netherlands and the United Kingdom play a crucial yet previously hidden role as conduits of offshore finance on its way to tax havens.”
Dr Eelke Heemskerk, who led the research, said that the work showed the importance of developed countries cleaning up their financial sectors.
He said: “In the context of Brexit, where you have the UK threatening, unless they get a deal, to change their model to be attractive to companies who want to protect themselves from taxes, well, they are already doing it.
“The Netherlands says they won’t let the UK be an offshore tax haven. That’s because they don’t want them taking their business.”