Scott Balber’s Latest Narrative on Trump Tower

For some weeks, I’ve been tracking how sometime Trump and current Agalarov family lawyer Scott Balber has actively crafted a story about the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting. Prior efforts to craft the story include:

  1. meeting between Rinat Akhmetshin and Ike Kaveladze (the latter of whom Balber represents as an employee of Agalarov) in Moscow in June 2017, just as Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort were both belatedly disclosing the meeting to various authorities; this story appears to have been an attempt to pre-empt the damage that would be done when Akhmetshin’s involvement became public
  2. Balber trip sometime before October to Russia to coordinate a story with and get documents from Natalia Veselnitskaya to back her version of the talking points she reportedly shared with Trump’s people
  3. Another October story, this “revealing” that Veselnitskaya’s research came from (or actually was shared with) Russian prosecutor Yuri Chaika, but insisting (per Balber) that Agalarov had no ties with the prosecutor
  4. Balber filled in a hole in the story for Goldstone: he told the Daily Beast that after his client Ike Kaveladze saw an email (from whom he doesn’t describe) indicating that Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and Don Jr would be at the meeting, he called a close associate of Goldstone’s (and a former employee of Balber’s client), Roman Beniaminov, to find out what the meeting was about. That’s the first he learned — at least as far as he told congressional investigators — that the meeting was about dealing “dirt” on Hillary.

Balber is back again in this CNN story. The story reveals two things.

First, Rob Goldstone tried to get the Trump campaign to establish a presence on VKontakte. The move is presented as some kind of marketing gimmick by CNN’s sources, but it would also establish an easy communications vehicle that would be harder for US intelligence services to wiretap.

More interesting, however, is the revelation that Goldstone forwarded this story to Scott Balber’s clients and observed that it was eerily weird given what had transpired at Trump Tower earlier.

In one email dated June 14, 2016, Goldstone forwarded a CNN story on Russia’s hacking of DNC emails to his client, Russian pop star Emin Agalarov, and Ike Kaveladze, a Russian who attended the meeting along with Trump Jr., Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Manafort, describing the news as “eerily weird” given what they had discussed at Trump Tower five days earlier.

One of the sources familiar with the content of the email downplayed the interaction, saying news of the DNC hack was surprising because in the run-up to the Trump Tower meeting, the Russian participants had promised information on illicit Russian funding of the DNC. But that dirt was not provided to Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort during the meeting, according to accounts from the participants.

The DNC hacking was not brought up at the meeting, another source said, explaining it would not be ‘oddly weird’ if the topic had been broached.

Which is where Balber comes in, trustworthy as always, insisting that hacked emails were not consistent with what was discussed at the meeting.

Scott Balber, the attorney for, confirms his client received the email but viewed it as odd because hacking was never discussed in the meeting and it was not consistent with what was discussed.

Balber, of course, has already intervened four times in this story to lay out a narrative — one I’m virtually certain is absolutely false — about what might be consistent with what was discussed. Given that both his clients received this email, he would have known about the email from the very start — certainly by June 2017 when he was coordinating a meeting in Moscow to limit the damage of this story. This email would have been central to his prior four efforts to craft a story in which emails would never come up.

But Goldstone — who curiously didn’t mention this email in his “I hate the word guilty” narrative of events, who has been hiding out in Thailand since this story broke and who expressed worry that Russian goons might take him out, who will be in DC next weeks for a bunch of interviews — seemed to think at the time the report of the stolen emails was eerily weird given what he had heard just days earlier.

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8 replies
  1. orionATL says:

    ew:

    “… For some weeks, I’ve been tracking how sometime Trump and current Agalarov family lawyer Scott Balber has actively crafted a story about the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting. Prior efforts to craft the story include:…”

    this is a nice stiching together of scraps of information to make a lovely patch quilt.

    1. the big,” conspiratorial” question that comes to mind is: was aras agarlov the russian co-conspirator with donald trump/campaign honchos/operatives who helped co-ordinate and even fund any effort by the russians to assist the trump campaign and republican party in the 2016 federal elections?

    2. “… Rob Goldstone tried to get the Trump campaign to establish a presence on VKontakte. The move is presented as some kind of marketing gimmick by CNN’s sources, but it would also establish an easy communications vehicle that would be harder for US intelligence services to wiretap… ”

    3. that scott balber has become very deeply involved (and that he filed a trump lawsuit against bill maher, suggesting intimacy and influence, or pandering) is highly significant in suggesting trump fear.

    maybe it was not just an original thought of his when don jr. suggested setting up a back channel to to russian gov’t to amb. kiselyak. maybe it had been discussed or even acted upon before.

    uh, oh. i am making this sound like the beginning of the emptywheel dossier. :))

    • lefty665 says:

      Bullshit, is there a Pulitzer for propaganda?  First, Bellingcat is a thoroughly discredited Brit propaganda operation. Second, Kerry announced immediately after the shootdown that we had images of the launch, but we have never released them to the Dutch investigation. They reportedly showed people in Ukranian uniform operating the Buk launcher, and were in an area controlled by Kiev.  Third, the intercepts were supplied by the likely perps, the Ukranian government.

      The Russians are not sweethearts, but the odds are that they did not do this.  Our neocons and Victoria Nuland at State are the real bad guys in Ukraine. Here is a different take on the story, including those Ukranian supplied intercepts, from investigative reporter Robert Parry:  https://consortiumnews.com/2016/09/28/troubling-gaps-in-the-new-mh-17-report/

  2. GKJames says:

    @Klynn, @lefty665 Nuland shot down MH17? Didn’t know that. I always thought it was Clinton … after killing Vince Foster and shortly before trying to poison Bernie Sanders. Goes to show how a fevered imagination can lead one astray.

    • lefty665 says:

      I hope you’re not really that dumb, but it’s hard to tell from your comment. You certainly are astray. As Asst Sec State Nuland bragged that she invested $5 billion to overthrow the elected government of Ukraine. The US is aligned there with the Pravy Sektor, right wingers who descend from Ukranian WWII collaborators with the Nazis. Elite neolib Dem embrace of the neocons and MIC is one of our more significant problems. Nuland is married to one of the neocon Kagan boys.

      Many folks who frequent EW are looking for common sense not usually available from the MSM, and I assume klynn’s posting although mistaken was sincere. You seem to have stumbled in here by mistake. Perhaps you left a trail of bread crumbs, or MSM cookies, so you can find your way out before you are affected by rationality. You also might try reading the Robert Parry, Consortium News posting on MH17 I linked. All it takes is a click of the mouse. It is a left click so you might get cooties, but who knows, you might actually learn something and it could help break your fever.

       

      • GKJames says:

        LOL. Your hope goes unrequited. What I can do, though, is keep competing threads of thought in my head at the same time and distinguish among them. That Nuland is a dim, petty clerk of empire (and for that reason alone likely a good matrimonial match for Kagan) is hardly news. Nor is it news that post-1990 US policy in eastern Europe has been anything but wise. Or that the quality of journalism could use improvement. What is a mystery is how these things negate the (non-US) photographic and audio evidence, along with witness statements, showing that it was indeed more likely than not that separatists (probably with the help of Russian “technical advisers”) who downed MH17, albeit unwittingly, thinking they were shooting at a Ukrainian plane. Blinded as you are, you will howl, Conspiracy by the CIA and the MSM! Fair enough, but you bring to mind the Simpson jurors, who could’ve been shown a video of OJ’s hacking their heads off but still would have acquitted. In passing: your surmise much, but know little; not buying into your conspiracy theories about the press, the national security apparatus, and Clinton isn’t the same as being dumb (though, who knows, I may be too dumb to realize it…) or naively accepting at face value everything that appears on the public airwaves. And it’s not to say that US foreign policy isn’t guilty of nefariousness in many places and many ways; the case of MH17 just isn’t one of them.

      • orionATL says:

        lefty:

        “… I hope you’re not really that dumb, but it’s hard to tell from your comment. You certainly are astray…“

        plus

        “…  You seem to have stumbled in here by mistake. Perhaps you left a trail of bread crumbs, or MSM cookies, so you can find your way out before you are affected by rationality….”

        that’s a really vicious retort to a humourous critical comment, lefty.

        all the more so when one considers your own pro-russian propaganda comment had no more to back it up than your personal beliefs and assertions – a currency that has been shown to be worthless around here time and again.

        what a jerk!

  3. John says:

    Gkjames and lefty665 you are both being ridiculous. The matter of fact is that there will forever be too many unknowns for any of us to know which of you is correct. You both make good points, personally I think it was Russia by accident, but that doesn’t make what ledty is saying untrue, I could certainly be wrong. It is good that we all strive to uncover these circumstances that remain hidden when it comes to world geopolitics, but that both of you are so willing to for no point really argue that your side is right when you just can’t know that, is a bad sign for civilization and democracy.

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