If Mueller can get the secret blocked number Trump used during the Trump tower meeting, that defense goes away.
I'm starting to wonder if Trump was at least wise enough at the time to accept the polling and rational analysis that he really had no chance of winning. It kind of explains why they were so obvious about making these deals with Russian agents. The FBI knew about this stuff before the meetings even happened. I wouldn't be surprised if they already have Trump's voice calling into this meeting. Anyway, I'm wondering that, with no real expectation of winning, the bargain was to influence the RNC platform and move the party to act as a serious barrier to the Clinton administration wrg to Russia sanctions. Obviously, a GOP-controlled Congress would generally block anything a Dem administration would try to do, anyway--simply proven again and again and again that it's the only thing they know how to do--but I think blocking Russia sanctions and giving Putin what he wants would have been a tough sell to the GOP and their base.
I wonder if the goal was really to get Trump and Manafort in there to solidify the GOP as an unquestioning pro-Russia party in the USA, which is exactly what they did at the RNC when they allowed Manafort so simply re-write their platform. As if it isn't eye-opening enough that the Trump campaign's
only contribution to the platform related to Russia and sanctions. I am thinking that they--Putin and Trump--didn't really care about keeping all of this secret, because they just needed to trap the GOP into promoting Russian hegemony in the occupied east and as a constant threat to Europe. Trump wouldn't need to be president in order to compel the GOP to sick to the policy that they had officially established. And hell--once the Russian influence and control of the RNC would be inevitably discovered, all the better for Russia, anyway. Because it's still chaos.
You would assume the Russians would be better at keeping this stuff secret; unless they didn't really want to. That includes knowing Trump well enough to know that he can't be trusted to do a single fucking thing that he promises to do. Vlady was never going to give him his tower, anyway.