Donald Trump Jr.'s 2016 trip to Paris for lunch with Moscow-linked couple remains a puzzle
Shortly before last year’s presidential election, Donald Trump Jr. flew to France for lunch at the Hotel Ritz Paris with a Syrian peace activist, who says she meets regularly with Russian officials, and her French husband, who nominated Russian President Vladimir Putin for a Nobel Peace Prize last year.
Donald Trump’s eldest son dined with his hosts, Randa Kassis and Fabien Baussart, at a corner table in the opulent Louis XV Salon. That night, Trump Jr. addressed a seminar organized by Baussart, who heads an obscure foreign policy think tank, for a fee of at least $50,000.
“Fabien invited him, and I talked to him” about “a collaboration between the U.S. and Russia on Syria,” Kassis recalled in a telephone interview. “No Russian was in this dinner.”
But Kassis said she flew to Moscow days after the Oct. 11, 2016, event and briefed Foreign Ministry officials in Putin’s government. And after Trump won the election, she boasted in broken English about sending a message to the new president through his son.
“I succeeded to pass Trump, through the talks with his son, the idea of how we can cooperate together to reach the agreement between Russia and the United States on Syria,” she wrote in a Facebook post that was later removed.
The elegant lunch and its surprising aftermath, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, fit into a growing pattern of suspicious approaches to Trump’s family members or campaign aides last year by Russian officials or by Kremlin intermediaries in meetings, emails and other contacts that now are the focus of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s criminal investigation.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-russia-trump-paris-20171115-story.html
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