Who Did Trump Jr. Talk to Before the 2016 Trump Tower Meeting?

This could be a break for President Trump in the ongoing Russia probe.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s dig into the now-infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump, Jr, Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and several Russians seems to have yielded the kind of news that should have Trump and his supporters breathing a little easier.

At issue were several phone calls that occurred between Trump, Jr and several blocked numbers, just before the meeting.

So who were those calls placed to?

CNN has received the information from three sources:

Records provided to the Senate Intelligence Committee show the calls were between Trump Jr. and two of his business associates, the sources said, and appear to contradict Democrats’ long-held suspicions that the blocked number was from then-candidate Donald Trump.

So the narrative of Donald Trump checking in, ahead of the meeting between his campaign surrogates and a Kremlin-connected attorney would appear to be dead in the water.

The meeting was initially instigated as a means of getting dirt from the Russian government on then-candidate Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton. Later on, the meeting was blown off by Trump, Jr as a meeting to discuss the Magnitsky Act and a program to allow for Americans to adopt Russian children that was canceled in retaliation of the act.

The June 2016 Trump Tower meeting was hatched when Agalarov asked British promoter Rob Goldstone to arrange a meeting between Veselnitskaya and campaign officials. In an email to Trump Jr., Goldstone said that Veselnitskaya would provide “dirt” on Clinton at the meeting. “If it’s what you say I love it,” Trump Jr. responded, though when the meeting occurred on June 9, 2016, Veselnitskaya focused her presentation on Russian sanctions, and not Clinton dirt.

Still, the calls surrounding that meeting were enough to raise suspicion.

Trump Jr.’s phone records included calls with two blocked phone numbers the same day he exchanged calls with Russian pop star Emin Agalarov, the son of a Russian oligarch who spearheaded the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. The calls came three days before the Trump Tower meeting, and an additional call with a private number occurred several hours after the meeting.

There’s no word on who the call after the meeting may have been with, but it’s possible it was with another business associate.

This will likely deflate the high hopes of those who felt this meeting and those calls would be the key to netting Trump, Sr. in the investigation.

The Senate is still investigating, but this was a key question members of the committee hoped to have answered.

Trump Jr. told congressional investigators in 2017 that he did not know who the blocked calls were with. When asked if he told his father about the meeting or the underlying offer of dirt on Clinton, he told the Senate Judiciary Committee: “No, I did not.”

But we now know he did.

He also consulted with his father about what to tell the media about the Trump Tower meeting.

House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Ca.), back before Democrats regained control of the House, groused over his Republican colleagues not pushing to get those phone records.

In a 2018 memo outlining the areas of the Russia investigation that went unexplored, Schiff wrote that “(b)ased on the timing of these calls, the committee must determine whether some of these calls may be between Trump Jr. and Donald J. Trump, including calls concerning the Trump Tower meeting.”

“We wanted to get the phone records to determine, was Donald Trump talking to his son about this meeting,” Schiff told CNN in November. “It’s an obvious investigative step, but one the Republicans were unwilling to take because they were afraid of where the evidence might lead.”

Schiff hasn’t commented on today’s news.

And speaking of what President Trump knew and when he knew it…

In addition to the phone calls, Schiff has called for a subpoena to Trump Jr. to compel him to discuss the conversations he had with his father in 2017 about the 2016 Trump Tower meeting before Trump Jr. released a misleading public statement about the purpose of the meeting. Trump Jr. has claimed the conversations with his father were protected by attorney-client privilege when he testified in December 2017.

I don’t think that’s how it works.

So some people will count this as a win. Some will feel pangs of disappointment. Either way, it’s probably best to hold off any celebrations until special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report.