Investigators in Congress have discovered an email sent by a Trump campaign aide in June 2016 referencing an effort to set up a meeting between Trump campaign officials and Russian President Vladimir Putin, CNN reported Wednesday, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter.
Rick Dearborn, who was Jeff Sessions’ chief of staff in the Senate as well as a Trump campaign aide at the time, sent the email passing along information from an individual from WV, a reference to West Virginia, sources told CNN. The individual was looking to connect the Trump campaign to Putin, CNN reported.
Dearborn (pictured above on the left), who is now the White House deputy chief of staff, seemed skeptical of the attempt to set up a meeting in the email, one source told CNN.
Dearborn was also involved in arranging Donald Trump’s speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., in April 2016, which was attended by then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Investigators are now questioning whether Dearborn helped arrange two separate meetings between Sessions and Kislyak, according to CNN.
The email from Dearborn about the individual looking to set up campaign officials in a meeting with Putin came at around the same time that Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort met with a Kremlin-linked lawyer and Russian lobbyist at Trump Tower in New York.
Another Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, also made several attempts to arrange meetings between Trump campaign staff and Russian officials between March and September 2016, as the Washington Post reported earlier in August.
