Wait a Second… Did the Donald Jr. Emails Prove the Pee Tape Is Real?

Quick disclaimer: I know you think I’m nuts. I’m not. I don’t think. I understand there’s a big conspiracy theorist community with a bad reputation out there, and I’m very self-aware about this. So: I don’t claim to have any special knowledge or special sources, and I’m not predicting the future, and I’m not using this as a reason to clamor for Trump’s impeachment or making something up because I’m mad HRC lost or to prove how clever I am about pointing out weird details that don’t mean anything and have no explanation anyway.

Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation is most likely the right one.

Also, I’m writing an article about the goddamn pee pee tape. The pee pee tape really doesn’t matter. But it’s funny as hell, and it’s actually really quite likely out there. But I can’t seem to get anyone to listen to my theories, so I’m turning to you, a captive audience. (Maybe it’s because I haven’t showered in a few weeks and have developed this weird eye twitch I can’t predict, and I drink about three Monsters a day and talk so fast so I spit bits of my Quizno’s sub all over the place.)

I’m not crazy. I know I should be writing about something meaningful, such as healthcare. (Which I did.) That’s much more important. Here’s a good resource on the new Senate healthcare bill. Read it. Call your senators.

But this is supposed to be a fun and strangely convincing argument. So, at great risk to my friendships, reputation, and social media footprint:

Donald Trump Jr.’s emails might have accidentally revealed that the pee-pee tape is real.

Thanks, DJTJ! Your emails have given us so much. Such as evidence of collusion, the glory of Rob Goldstone, and, finally, corroboration that the pee-pee tape exists.

You have no idea how excited I am to be the first one, I think, to put together a logical proof that this horrifying thing is actually real. Here we go.

A few ground rules: I’m not using anything that cites anonymous sources. I’m just using publicly available information and connecting the dots logically. The Steele dossier, however, does cite anonymous sources, and the fact I’m using it might make you click out of this right now. But I’ll point out that the reason you’re clicking out is the very reason you’re reading this: you don’t believe the pee pee tape is real. In a sense, this is as much a defense of the dossier as it is anything else. Anyway, many parts of that thing have been corroborated, and DJTJ’s emails actually just corroborated more. Also, the Senate, the House, and the FBI are all using the dossier to help guide their investigations.

Okay, let’s go to the video tape!

Yesterday, a friend of mine on Twitter, Dr. Dena Grayson (@DrDenaGrayson), had the brilliant idea to cross-check to see if DJTJ, Manafort, and Kushner’s meeting with the Russian agent had been mentioned anywhere in the Steele dossier. She found that yep, it was indeed in there.

Next step, thanks to DJTJ’s emails, we can narrow down this “Source D” to being one of three people: Emin Agalarov or (more likely) his father Aras, or Rob Goldstone, the guy who was the intermediary for the DJTJ meeting. All of these people would fit the description of the “close associate” of Trump mentioned in the above pic, and we know they were involved in the June meeting because they were named in DJTJ’s emails:

I’ll point out here that two outlets, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, have said Source D was a guy named Sergei Millian. But those cite anonymous sources, and Millian doesn’t fit the dossier description you’ve seen above. Those other three guys certainly do. I actually don’t believe The Post and WSJ have it right.

So Dena’s digging sent me digging, because I had a hunch.

The Agalarovs are long-time friends of the Trump family. They planned and paid for President Trump’s Miss Universe excursion to Moscow in 2013. In fact, Aras Avalarov is mentioned by name in the Steele dossier. It’s not a great cameo.

You see where this is going, yes?

The Agalarovs had set up the Miss Universe pageant as a way to propel Emin’s pop star career into the American market. Aras paid Mr. Trump, who has no deals in Russia, no business in Russia, a pretty steep $20 million for the opportunity to host Miss Universe in Moscow. During that trip, Mr. Trump made a bizarre cameo in a music video starring Emin singing a very bad song, with about a dozen Miss Universe contestants dolling around the place. It’s remarkably bad. If you haven’t seen it, you’re welcome.

That music video was filmed in part in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Moscow. Another, slightly more disgusting video was reportedly filmed in the Moscow Ritz-Carlton during this trip. And guess who the source for this information was?

Winner winner.

Now we have the names of two people who were involved in both affairs, the secret 2016 collusion meeting and the 2013 pageant: Emin and Aras. But Rob Goldstone was also along for the trip. He helpfully and intelligently posted lots of pictures of him with Trump and the Agalarovs.

Of these three, I’m guessing it’s probably not Aras Agalarov, who you’ll remember was actually called out by name later in the Steele dossier as knowing “the details” about Trump paying for sex in St. Petersburg, where the “key witnesses,”as the dossier puts it, were “silenced.” Highly unlikely Steele would mask a source only to unmask him later.

The Trumps are also still very close with the Agalarovs. President Trump even sent the family a handwritten thank-you note after his election victory. But now Agalarov just denied, very weirdly, absolutely everything in the DJTJ emails, which, you’ll remember, DJTJ confessed as real.

This leaves us with Emin and Goldstone. The dossier says Source D “organized and managed” Trump’s trips to Moscow. That duty would fall not to young Emin, but to good ol’ Goldstone. Here he is.

You might have noticed there’s clearly a second conspiratorial connection here to the Trump campaign. A long-lost brother, perhaps.

So let’s be honest: The only reason we can’t let ourselves entertain the idea that the pee pee tape exists is because it sounds completely insane.

For a president.

But if we were talking about that other Donald Trump, the loud and tacky real estate tycoon who likes flashy things and young women, is a virulent misogynist and serial assaulter and philanderer who has had several wives, says weird sexual stuff on the radio about his own daughter, and promoted for months in a row a bizarre, embarrassing, racist and hateful conspiracy theory about Barack Obama, whom he attacks on Twitter on a near weekly basis, it gets a little less far-fetched. Before he ran for president, this whole thing would seem perfectly believable, right?

Guess what? We are talking about that Donald Trump.

The only way this doesn’t hold water is if a) Steele made it all up, or b) if Source D is lying. In either case, though, we know that both Steele and Source D told the truth about the June meeting. DJTJ himself proved that. This means Source D would have had to tell the truth to Steele about that, but tell a lie about the pee-pee tape party. Given that, in the Steele dossier, those two events are part of the same report, D pretty likely told those two stories at the same time.

What’s funny, though, is that the June meeting only has one source: D. The pee pee tape story has four independent sources.

It’s also possible the pee-pee tape story is disinformation the Russian government fed Steele in order to hurt his credibility. Well, logically that pee tape can’t be disinformation.

First, Putin would have had to have been onto Steele before June 20, 2016, the dateline for the pee pee tape report. This means Putin would’ve been aware of Steele’s operation by then and known Steele was making this dossier the whole time, allowing sources to leak information, some of which has already been corroborated. Way too risky. Putin can’t read the future.

We also know Putin has killed some of the people he found out to be sources long after the fact. Why keep them close for that long, letting them leak whatever they wanted, if he knew they were rats?

In the end, the pee pee tape isn’t important. It’s a curiosity, a sideshow distraction for Russia’s ongoing attack on our democracy. But it’s pretty fucking funny. That’s all.

Yet if we can allow ourselves to believe there’s a really good chance that this most bizarre, most insane claim might actually be true, then we can believe the more realistic (and more important) accusations might be true too. Such as, say, the sitting president colluded with our most dangerous adversary to commit treason against the United States by undermining the democratic process and exploiting the hearts and minds of his own voters, digitally weaponizing their trust in him and turning it against their fellow Americans in order to cheat to win an election.

Your only other option: Steele made it all up. If that’s what you choose to believe, fine, but at this point you have less evidence for your belief than I do for mine.

After all, Trump’s argument is that he says it doesn’t exist.

My argument? Trump says it doesn’t exist.