EVERYTHING IN IT APPEARS TO BE TRUE:

While Donald Jr. and Veselnitskaya now maintain that she provided no useful intelligence on Hillary Clinton at the meeting, the Agalarovs seem to have secured a place in American political history by brokering the meeting.

But that family name, and the contours of the plot described in the email, were already well-known to Christopher Steele, the former British spy who spent much of last year compiling a private intelligence dossier on what sources in Russia described to him as a Kremlin operation to help Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. [...]

Steele reported that at least two sources said that information of some kind on Clinton had been provided to the Trump campaign by Russia. One of those sources, described as "a close associate of Trump who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow" reported in June 2016, "that this Russian intelligence had been 'very helpful.'"

One of Steele's sources also claimed that the theft of emails from Democratic officials, later provided to WikiLeaks, "had been conducted with the full knowledge and support of Trump and senior members of his campaign team."

Stolen emails were not mentioned in the plot to help Trump described to Donald Jr. by Goldstone, but it was just three days after the June 9 meeting with Veselnitskaya in Trump Tower that Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, first revealed that he had obtained what turned out to be emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee.

Later in his report, Steele said that two sources in another Russian city, St. Petersburg, claimed that Trump had illicit sexual encounters there during another trip. Both of those sources claimed that a business associate of Trump, Aras Agalarov, "will know the details."

Among those entirely unsurprised by the revelation that Agalarov was named at the center of a plot to help the Russian government help Trump was Alexey Navalny, the opposition activist who hopes to run against Putin in the 2018 Russian presidential election.

Writing on his blog, Navalny called the idea of a Putin-Chaika-Agalarov-Trump pipeline "very plausible."

As Navalny noted, Agalarov seems to be close to Chaika and spoke out loudly in his defense in 2015, when Navalny's anti-corruption foundation produced a damning investigative report accusing the prosecutor of having abused his position to make his children rich.

Tweet   @brothersjudd