Imagine the excitement at the top of the Trump campaign: finally, the Russians were coming through! A ‘well-connected’ lawyer was on her way from the Kremlin with the dirt on Hillary. Donald Jr, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort assembled to meet her in a conference room at Trump Tower. All three were there together, in the middle of the campaign, because of an email from a British music publicist called Rob Goldstone. He had written to Don Jr: ‘The Crown Prosecutor of Russia [has] offered to provide the Trump Campaign with some official documents that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father. This is obviously very high level and sensitive information, but is part of Russia and its Government’s support for Mr. Trump.’
But the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, ‘droned on’ without producing anything – anything at all. Manafort looked at his phone the whole time. Kushner texted his secretary: ‘Get me out of this meeting as soon as possible.’ Don Jr later called the whole thing a ‘nothingburger’. Goldstone says now that the tantalising Russian offer set out in his email was, basically, made up by him. He writes as much in his memoir Pop Stars, Pageants & Presidents. ‘No one had actually mentioned any documents,’ he says, ‘official or otherwise, but I reasoned that since an attorney was the person making the presentation and requesting the meeting, they would undoubtedly have a document or two.’ The email was 137 words of ‘pure puffery’.
This explanation is rather convenient, I said to Goldstone: no Russia conspiracy to see here, just a PR man plying his trade. He replied: ‘If I’m guilty of anything, it really is the fact that I wrote this email in three minutes on a cellphone and didn’t pay maybe as much attention to it as I should.’ Goldstone got his walk-on part in the Trump-Russia drama because he managed a singer, Emin Agalarov, whose father, Aras, is close to Vladimir Putin. Pop Stars, Pageants & Presidents describes Goldstone’s journey to represent ‘unquestionably Azerbaijan’s biggest music star’ – and later how his life was nearly wrecked by the email he wrote at his behest.
