Steven Harper has assembled a very useful and impressive timeline of all the connections between Trump and Russia. It’s posted here, and updated regularly. As impressive as I find it, the problem with it is that it’s a series of overlapping timelines, rather than one single timeline. A way to sort it by a specific topic would be helpful, and certainly possible electronically. I hope they will do this in the future. For now, there are a couple of subthreads that I found particularly interesting to follow, and worth putting together here. I’m sure more will be added to these in the future. If I’m moved to update, I’ll do it in a separate post to preserve the sense of what we know now. I’m also going to keep the subthreads in separate posts so they don’t get buried under each other. Some text is copied and pasted directly from the timeline, other text is paraphrased.

The Trump Jr email/meeting timeline is below, and others will follow:

Subthread 2: Trump campaign and the GOP platform position on Russia and Ukraine.

Subthread 3: all about Manafort

Subthread 4: who is Felix Sater?

The obvious one for me to look into was the timeline of events related to Donald Trump Jr’s meeting with the Russian lawyer, Veselnitskaya.

This subthread starts on June 3, 2016. To put this in context, Trump was not yet the nominee, and the Convention didn’t start until July 18. Most of the primaries were done, but a handful would happen over the next few days, all of which would go to Trump. Trump was, nevertheless, way ahead in the delegate count, and almost certain to be the nominee. He had 1144 pledged delegate, and Cruz had 551. The campaign had to be confident that he was the nominee. That’s when this happened:

June 3, 2016: Trump Jr is told by email that there is a Russian lawyer (a government prosecutor) who offered to provide the Trump campaign official documents and information that would incriminate HRC. Trump Jr says “I love it” and sets up plans to meet (the meeting was scheduled by follow-up emails on June 7, and but was later pushed back to 4:00).

June 7, 2016: Trump gives speech in New Jersey and says, “I am going to give a major speech on probably Monday of next week [June 13] and we’re going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons.” Although we don’t know at this point, but it’s hard to imagine that this isn’t thrown in there because he’s anticipating what’s coming at the meeting scheduled for two days later.

June 9, 2016:  Trump Jr, Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and Veselnitskaya meet at Trump tower. The emails say the meeting was scheduled at 4:00 PM, but the time it actually happened is not confirmed in the timeline. It’s fair to assume that it happened at 4:00 PM.

The same day, 40 minutes after the meeting was scheduled, Trump posts a tweet about HRC’s deleted emails.

6 days later, Guccifer 2.0 claims credit for the DNC hack and starts posting documents.

July 27, 2016 Trump makes comment at press conference saying that he hopes Russia can find missing HRC emails.

By the end of July, 2016 (exact date unknown), FBI opens an investigation into possible collusion between Trump campaign and Russian operatives.

Fast forward to July 2017…

July 8, 2017 New York Times reports the story of the June 9, 2016 meeting. Donald Trump Jr. issues statement ““It was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up… I was asked to attend the meeting by an acquaintance, but was not told the name of the person I would be meeting with beforehand.”

July 9, 2017 Donald Trump Jr changes his story and issues a new statement adding that he was meeting because he was told the person might have information helpful to the campaign, and adding details about what he said happened in the meeting.

July 10, 2017 Donald Trump Jr confirms he’s hired a criminal defense attorney.

July 10, 2017 New York Times reports about the email exchange.

July 11, 2017 Donald Trump Jr posts the email exchanges on Twitter, and says “The information they suggested they had about Hillary Clinton I thought was political opposition research…To put this in context, this occurred before the current Russian fever was in vogue.”