If you don’t mind me butting in, could this specific question be the result of a misunderstanding? What I mean to say is that while the earlier communication from Manafort is aimed at squashing an attempt to, in my opinion, do an event with Putin similar to what they did with Enrique Pena Nieto in Mexico to let Trump look Presidential standing side to side with a world leader. The email from July 14, from how I read it, seems to indicate instead a desire to hold a foreign policy get together between George, Manafort, and one other on the Trump side and Ivan Timofeev (who matches in the Post report the role played by the MFA official in George’s case) and members of the Russian government to discuss foreign policy matters.

I can’t say I know for sure the traditional extent foreign governments interact with Presidential campaigns beyond the fact that they do, and that Clinton and Obama officials say they never got similar invitations, but I wonder whether this was evidence of part of an espionage operation, or just an attempt by the Russians to feel out Trump’s positions on various issues from someone a little brighter than George. Especially since unlike Clinton and Obama, who had made statements in the past on foreign policy and held foreign policy positions in the U.S. government (Secretary of State and Senate Foreign Relations Committee respectively) would therefore be lesser unknowns to a man who’s last job prior to running for President was hosting a game show. The fact that someone who, as far as I can tell, is primarily an academic in the form of Timofeev was the main Russian contact on this really pushes me to think that the greater focus would be on figuring out what Trump would do if elected. And, if this is anything to go by  (https://rubensteinfellows.duke.edu/contacts-with-russian-embassy/), it was not at all uncommon during the Cold War for American campaigns to contact Soviet diplomatic personnel in the U.S. to get an idea of the Soviet’s views on different issues. So it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that a campaign lacking depth in foreign policy experience would desperately want to feel out the views of other countries.

As to the offer for dirt on Clinton, the first thing that comes to mind is that of course any actual and halfway competent intelligence operation done by the Russians wouldn’t be done over Skype, given concerns over PRISM. Second, the material that Foreign Contact 1 (identified tentatively as Joseph Mifsud of Stirling University and Stirling’s London Academy of Diplomacy) claimed the Russians had on Clinton isn’t described as far as I can tell in the Complaint. The Statement of the Offense however (https://www.justice.gov/file/1007346/download) describes it in a little more detail. According to that document, the material that the Russians supposedly had were thousands of Clinton’s emails. The obvious problem with this is that none of those emails ever saw the light of day during the campaign, which raises doubt to my mind as to their existence. Additionally, there is the whole weirdness of meeting ‘Putin’s niece’ who really wasn’t Putin’s niece (that’s so far the one person in all of this who hasn’t been even tentatively identified) in London and that while the Complaint quotes a message from George saying that he was introduced to the Russian Ambassador to the U.K. (who also was the Deputy Foreign Minister), in the Statement of the Offense it’s stated that George never actually was introduced to the Ambassador.

Honestly, this smells to me more like Mifsud more likely than not was engaging in some bullshit artistry. I can imagine a scenario where he wants to play the go between with Trump and the Russians and move up in the world. George, being the type of guy who’d voluntarily be interviewed by the FBI, lie to them, and then try to stall them by deleting his Facebook account after the fact, and who believed that he met Putin’s niece is not a terribly bright guy and thus falls for it. Mifsud dangles the prospect of Clinton emails, for which again we have no evidence were actually in Russia’s possession to begin with and seem not to be the type of thing you’d inform a Western university professor of, as a means of keeping George hooked (the whole thing about the Trump campaign trying to find Hillary’s missing emails I think is an interesting story and not necessarily dependent on Russia, but this has run long enough as is). Mifsud uses his connections from speaking at Russian think tanks to establish himself as a go between with the Trump campaign, some of whom want to burnish Trump’s foreign policy credentials and others the campaign’s lack of foreign policy knowledge, and the Russians, who want an idea of what exactly Trump’s positions are on various relevant issues. George want’s to use this as a means to round out a resume that includes how he was a Model UN champ and to make himself important in the campaign, and suggests the Mission to Moscow for the same reason that Trump meets Pena Nieto in the fall. That idea gets scratched, but the idea of having people from the Trump campaign having a sit down with Russian foreign policy officials is still in play until Manafort gets let go, assuming it didn’t happen at some point later on.

Nothing describes this blog more accurately than this quote from John Updike talking about the conspiracy theories and intense focus on the final seconds of JFK’s life:

“seems to demonstrate how perilously empiricism verges on magic.”

There is so much “empiricism” here that the magic thinking thrives making you a laughingstock.

My compliments again.  AI now have emotion chips.  Won’t Data be jealous.