Russia's real purpose in the Trump Tower meeting

General Michael Hayden, former National Security Adviser, former head of the CIA, and former Director of National Security, has a new book out:  The Assault on Intelligence, which contains a very interesting insight into the July 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with Don Trump, Jr. and the Russians.

Hayden addresses the question:   what was in this for the Russians?   Of course, what we've heard mostly is that they were wanting to make an appeal to Trump that, if elected, he would get rid of the sanctions against Russia.

But this was still early in the general election campaign.   They were ostensibly offering dirt on Hillary Clinton -- and maybe what they had to offer was the hacked emails from the DNC and Clinton's campaign manager.

Hayden has something to add that makes sense.   He says that this was part of the Russian's effort to gain an asset in the Trump campaign, and the focus here was on Don, Jr.    The Russians' technique of gaining an asset (it's really the same as th any spy agency) is to identify someone who is in an advantageous position (Donn Jr. was), and then offer something he wants (the dirt of Hillary).   They had already identified both of these as present in Don Jr.   The next step is to gain some leverage over the person, something they could use as pressure to cooperate all the way up to outright blackmail (here it could have been some collusion in getting or illegally using the Clinton emails).

Another former CIA Director, John McLaughlin, agreed with this assessment.  He predicted that, in some future Russian book on how to recruit spy assets, this will be presented as a classical case study in recruiting assets.   He added that, if our news media had not reported this story, and thereby destroyed Don Jr.'s usefulness as an asset to them, history might have a very different story to tell about Russia and the Trump administration.

In other words, this recruitment of Don Jr. as a Russian asset was working -- and might still be working had the meeting not been exposed by journalists' reporting.  

Ralph