There Is No Doubt That Fredo Trump Was Colluding With The Kremlin-- Or Trying To

Last July, pointing out that "any true Godfather aficionado must see that the Trumps are simply a family full of Fredos," Vanity Fair published a feature by Yohana Desta, Is Donald Trump Jr. Really the Fredo of His Family? An Investigation. And they weren't the first to make the comparison. Desta begins her piece by acknowledging that Jr. "has weathered a horde of comparisons to Fredo Corleone-- the useless, bumbling middle brother from The Godfather I and II, who essentially signs his own death warrant after clumsily betraying his brother Michael. The comparisons have hit a fever pitch particularly since the New York Times reported that the eldest Trump child had met with a Russian lawyer in an attempt to obtain damaging information about Hillary Clinton. It was exacerbated on Tuesday when Trump Jr.-- in a profoundly misguided stab at one-upping the scoop from the New York Times-- released a short statement and screenshots of the incriminating e-mail exchange via Twitter. Perhaps it’s no wonder that Trump’s inner circle has been calling him Fredo since the campaign." But, Jr., she warns in regard to his siblings "is just the highest-ranking Fredo in an interchangeable lineup of Fredos."

Why? Because each and every last one of the elder Trump children believes themselves to be the Michael Corleone of the family, which is the first rule of being a Fredo.

Trump forced both his dim-witted sons to get plastic surgery because he thought they were ugly

Donald Jr. has taken the top prize with his latest acts, but there is no doubt that he still believes himself to be the canny, ruthlessly efficient Michael-- or at least a brash, manly Sonny. (Sonny probably also would have eschewed the advice of his family’s Tom Hagen and tweeted out screenshots of his incriminating e-mails, if he had known what e-mails and tweets were.) This makes Junior the truest Fredo, though it also merely bolsters the fact that he has been a Fredo all along: he’s spent years as the most active Trump kid on social media, constantly cheerleading papa’s efforts. Alas, his visibility has mostly yielded very public blunders.

...The thing about Fredo, though, is that even though he was a consummate fool, he intuited enough to know that people thought he was a fool—try as he might to convince everyone otherwise. (“I can handle things! I’m smart!”) But Trump Jr. continues to display public hubris to the point of dangerous self-incrimination, the sort that could land him behind bars if the Tom Hagens in his life are not very careful.



It should go without saying that Trump Jr. being Fredo does not necessarily make his father Vito Corleone. In truth, Donald Trump is just Fredo Sr., who begat a litter of younger, even less competent Fredos. If movie Fredo suddenly came to life and became a part of the Trump family, he might actually be its sole Michael-- which says everything about the current state of the elder Trump brood.

Early Monday morning, Bloomberg reporters Irina Reznik and Henry Meyer broke the story about overt collusion. Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Kremlin-connected attorney who was one of the Russians who met with Jr. before the election said in a 2-and-a-half-hour interview in Moscow said that Fredo claimed the Trumps would reevaluate the Putin-hated Magnitsky law if the Russians would give them written evidence that illegal proceeds went to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. She claims she is willing to testify to both Mueller and to the Senate Judiciary Committee. (Devin Nunes has purposely-- on behalf of Trump-- made a mockery of the House Intelligence Committee and no one takes that seriously any longer.)

Her June 9, 2016 encounter with Donald Trump Jr., President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and then campaign manager Paul Manafort in New York plays a key role in allegations that the campaign worked with Russia to defeat Clinton.

Veselnitskaya said she went to the New York meeting to show Trump campaign officials that major Democratic donors had evaded U.S. taxes and to lobby against the so-called Magnitsky law that punishes Russian officials for the murder of a Russian tax accountant who accused the Kremlin of corruption.

“Looking ahead, if we come to power, we can return to this issue and think what to do about it," Trump Jr. said of the 2012 law, she recalled. “I understand our side may have messed up, but it’ll take a long time to get to the bottom of it,” he added, according to her.

Veselnitskaya also said Trump Jr. requested financial documents showing that money that allegedly evaded U.S. taxes had gone to Clinton’s campaign. She didn’t have any and described the 20-minute meeting as a failure.

...Veselnitskaya says she told the president’s son she had information that Clinton’s campaign may have received some of almost $1 billion the wealthy Ziff brothers gained from Russian investments that allegedly evaded U.S. taxes.

She says she was acting in a private capacity and not as a Russian government representative. But there is evidence of an official imprimatur: She brought to the meeting a four-page talking-points memorandum in English that contained very similar information to a document she had provided to the office of Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika in 2015, both of which were obtained by Bloomberg News. Alexander Kurennoy, the spokesman for the prosecutor general’s office, declined to comment.

In April last year, Veselnitskaya took part in a meeting with a visiting congressional delegation headed by Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican with close ties to Russia, that was attended by a senior prosecution official. There she raised the allegations about the Ziff brothers’ money. President Vladimir Putin has recently made the same argument.

...Ziff Brothers Investments has contributed to Republicans and Democrats since the 2012 election cycle, according to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics. It gave between $50,000 and $100,000 to the Clinton Global Initiative and made modest donations to the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

A spokesman for the Ziff family said it had no comment.

In the interview, Veselnitskaya said she sent her memo to Goldstone in advance so Trump Jr. could familiarize himself with the issues, but he seemed not to have done so. When she began laying out the case against the Ziffs, she said that he asked: “This money the Ziffs got from Russia, do you have any financial documents showing that this money went to Clinton’s campaign?”

She didn’t and the meeting quickly fell apart. Kushner left after a few minutes and Manafort appeared to have fallen asleep. “The meeting was a failure; none of us understood what the point of it had been,’’ Veselnitskaya said, adding she had no further contacts with the Trump campaign.

Veselnitskaya has told NBC that she never had damaging information on Clinton but that Fredo seemed desperate to get some. Overall, American voters have a bad impression of Fredo Trump and his collusion with Putin's government on behalf of the Trump campaign.