One of Donald Trump and his administration’s most glaring issues is a dangerously faulty memory. Most days, it seems like nobody who works in that White House actually has any comprehension of what happened the day before, last year, or in the lead-up to the World War II. This wouldn’t be a big deal if everyone in the country were as stupid as they all are, but since that’s not the case, we all have to suffer with the knowledge that nobody who is running this country has any idea what they’re doing.
One of the biggest gaps in the Trump administration’s memory is the entirety Russia, but specifically its very overt attempts to undermine the recent presidential election. For whatever reason, people who work for Trump or who are related to Trump have an uncanny tendency to forget important meetings with high-level Russian officials, and now CNN is reporting on some possible evidence of someone from Russia trying to set up another big meeting. According to the story, congressional investigators have found an email from “a top Trump aide” that references a “previously unreported” attempt to get Trump campaign officials to meet with Vladimir Putin last year during the election.
The aide is Rick Dearborn, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, and the email indicates that he tried to pass along information to higher-ups in the campaign about someone “from WV” who wanted to help Trump’s people connect with Putin’s people. CNN doesn’t know who the “WV” person is or if their attempt was successful, but a source told CNN that it was someone with political connections in West Virginia (obviously). That all seems a little thin, but supposedly this email came in right around the same time that Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner were meeting with Russians at Trump Tower, and it sounds like Dearborn may have been involved in arranged the Mayflower Hotel event where then-Senator Jeff Sessions had a conveniently forgettable meeting with former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
If you buy all of this, it sounds like Russia may have been poking around for ways to get into the Trump campaign, and this Dearborn guy—possibly without realizing it—may have been helping. The details on all of this are pretty slim and the idea of some guy getting an email that specifically says it’s trying to set up a meeting between Trump and Putin seems way too easy, though, so who knows what’s really going on with any of this.