Just two days before Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer to obtain information that would “incriminate” Hillary Clinton — and four days after Trump Jr. received an email from Trump acquaintance Rob Goldstone stating that the Russian government possessed that damaging information and wanted to share it with the campaign — then-presidential candidate Donald Trump gave a fiery speech in which he promised to reveal a wide range of unspecified criminal allegations against Clinton.
Trump made the remarks on June 7, 2016, the night that he swept primary elections in California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Dakota — giving the former reality TV host enough delegates to ensure that he would win the 2016 Republican nomination for president. In that primary night address , Trump promised that six days later, on June 13, he would deliver a speech exposing Clinton’s alleged wrongdoing.
But on June 3, Goldstone sent his email to Trump Jr. saying that the Russians were offering just such allegedly incriminating Clinton information to the Trump team. Whether the elder Trump was aware of that email has yet to be publicly revealed.
Goldstone is a music publicist representing a Russian pop singer, Emin Agalarov, whose father Aras Agalarov is a Russian billionaire with close ties to the country’s president Vladimir Putin. In 2013, Putin presented the elder Agalarov with the country’s prestigious Order of Honor award. The billionaire is also a business partner of the senior Donald Trump, who now holds the office of United States president.
Watch Trump promise to reveal dirt on the Clinton family in his June 7, 2016, speech, in the video below. The passage regarding the alleged Clinton revelations starts at the seven-minute mark
Trump and Agalarov were partners in a proposed “Trump Tower Moscow” real estate project, which was never completed. And in 2013 when Trump held the Miss Universe beauty pageant, a production which he owned at the time, in Moscow, the event was held in a sprawling business, entertainment and shopping complex owned by Agalarov. As a result, the Russian billionaire’s son, Emin, was showcased performing two songs at the pageant infant of a global television audience, helping to launch his career .
In fact, Trump even appeared in a music video promoting one of Emin Agalarov’s songs. View that video for the song “In Another Life” featuring an appearance by Donald Trump, below.
Goldstone — who has handled overseas publicity for such American music stars as Michael Jackson, B.B. King, and James Taylor, according to a report in the music industry magazine Billboard — contacted Trump Jr. via email on June 3, offering to set up a meeting between the Trump campaign and a Russia lawyer who would offer up the purported damaging info on Clinton.
Four days later, the senior Trump gave his speech, seen above on this page, promising to reveal damaging information on Clinton. The meeting itself took place on June 9 and was attended not only by Trump Jr., but by the then-manager of Trump’s campaign, Paul Manafort, and Trump’s son-in-law and chef adviser Jared Kushner.
About two months after the meeting, Manafort was forced to resign as Trump campaign manager over his failure to fully disclose his extensive business ties to Russian government interests. Kushner has come under fire for his failure to list two previous meetings with top Russians on his firms applying for a security clearance. The June 9 meeting would be a third Russian meeting that Kushner simply omitted from his security clearance application — a potential violation of the law.
Trump delivered his promised June 13 speech, but though he opened the speech by saying, “this was going to be a speech on Hillary Clinton and how bad a President… she would be,” he switched the main subject of the speech to terrorism because on the previous day, a gunman claiming to represent the terrorist organization ISIS massacred 49 people at an Orlando, Florida, nightclub .
FLASHBACK: Don Jr. July 24, 2016. On the Clinton campaign’s claims that the Russians were helping Trump: “It’s disgusting. It’s so phony.” pic.twitter.com/xnD386ewMq
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) July 11, 2017
Though the email from Goldstone proves that Trump Jr. knew by June 3 that the Russian government was involved in collecting dirt on Clinton and attempting to pass it on to the Trump campaign — which was eager to accept the damaging info regardless of the source, the Trump Jr, emails show — he continued to publicly deny that the campaign had anything to do with Russia, even calling the allegation “disgusting,” as seen in the video above.
[Featured Image by Alex Wong/Getty Images]