Updated: July 15, 11:40 a.m. EDT
The latest revelation about the Trump campaign’s secret meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya on June 9, 2016, is that the Russian lawyer was accompanied to Trump Tower that day by Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist who was working to repeal sanctions on Russian officials implicated in human rights abuses.
The presence of the lobbyist, and his rumored ties to Russian intelligence, undercut claims of transparency by Donald Trump Jr. who somehow failed to mention it in any of his accounts of the meeting, which was also attended by his father’s campaign chairman at the time, Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner, whose legal team disclosed it to the FBI recently.
But the fact that Akhmetshin was granted an audience with senior campaign officials could be another indication that Russian attempts to help elect Donald Trump president of the United States might have been part of a broader effort to get sanctions lifted without acceding to American pressure to make democratic reforms at home or withdraw support from separatist rebels in Ukraine.
After email correspondence setting up the meeting was leaked to the New York Times this week, the president’s son admitted that he had agreed to it because a Russian business partner had passed on word that a senior Kremlin official wanted to help the Trump campaign by providing intelligence on Hillary Clinton.
He denied, however, that the Russian who came to the meeting, Veselnitskaya, brought any dirt on Clinton with her from Moscow.
Instead, both Donald Trump Jr. and Veselnitskaya now maintain, the lawyer came to Trump Tower to speak to the Trump campaign about her quest to repeal the Magnitsky Law, a measure passed by Congress in 2012 that set up a mechanism to sanction foreign official involved in rights abuses. After the law was passed, the Obama Administration sanctioned Russians connected to the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who died in custody in 2009 after accusing officials of embezzling $230 million in proceeds from a tax fraud scheme. The younger Trump’s initial claim that the meeting was just about the stalled adoption of Russian children by American families is related to the Magnitsky because Russia imposed a ban on such adoptions in retaliation for those sanctions.
According to a complaint filed with the Justice Department last year by lawyers for Magnitsky’s former employer, the American investor William Browder, Akhmetshin had been working for Veselnitskaya to undercut the Magnitsky Law.
The same complaint also accused Akhmetshin of being “a former member of the Russian military intelligence services,” an accusation the lobbyist denied in an email to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty last year. However, Steve LeVine, a former New York Times investigative journalist who first used Akhmetshin as a source two decades ago, reported in Axios on Friday that in 1998, the lobbyist “openly described his years as an officer in the Soviet GRU, the military intelligence arm, serving in Afghanistan.”
In an interview with NBC News earlier this week, Veselnitskaya had insisted that her work was completely unconnected to the Russian government, and was instead motivated by humanitarian concern for the orphans deprived of a chance to find new homes with American families.
That contention would appear to be undermined by the fact that Veselnitskaya apparently came to the meeting at Trump Tower that day directly from a court appearance in Lower Manhattan, where she had been defending the firm of a Russian client accused by the federal government of money laundering in a scheme to hide some of the proceeds from the tax fraud uncovered by Magnitsky before his death. (An email to Donald Trump Jr. asking to delay the meeting until 4 p.m. on June 9 said that Veselnitskaya would be “in court until 3.” Her client’s firm, Prevezon Holdings, was scheduled to appear before the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals that same day.)
The federal government dropped plans to take the Prevezon Holdings case to trial in May of this year, two months after President Trump fired Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who had filed the charges. Veselnitskaya’s client’s firm agreed to pay $5,896,333.65 to settle out of court, with no admission of wrongdoing.
One of Veselnitskaya’s former colleagues, however, told The Intercept that her claim to have been working against the Magnitsky Law independently of the Russian government was untrue. According to her ex-colleague, who would only agree to speak on background, Veselnitskaya made no secret of the fact that she was in frequent contact with a senior Kremlin official, Russia’s Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika, during her work on the legal case.
Early Saturday morning in Moscow, The Wall Street Journal published a new interview with Veselnitskaya in which she admitted that she had coordinated her work to undermine the sanctions law with the Russian prosecutor’s office, including Prosecutor General Chaika. “I personally know the general prosecutor,” Veselnitskaya told The Journal. “In the course of my investigations, I shared information with him.”
Veselnitskaya also acknowledged to the newspaper that, at the time of her meeting in Trump Tower, she was representing Aras and Emin Agalarov, property developers who paid $20 million to stage the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in conjunction with the American who then owned it, Donald Trump.
Her connection to both Chaika and the Agalarovs seems to explain how Veselnitskaya ended up at Trump Tower. The email exchange setting up the meeting began with a message sent to Donald Trump Jr. by Rob Goldstone, a publicist who works for the Agalarovs, in which he said that Aras Agalarov had been told by Russia’s senior law enforcement official, Chaika, that the Kremlin was eager to share Russian intelligence on Clinton with the Trump campaign.
Although Aras Agalarov tried to maintain that he barely knew Goldstone after the emails were made public this week, the publicist has worked for the family for years, as evidenced by images of him on the Instagram page of Agalarov’s wife Irina, during the 2013 pageant in Moscow, and a number of photographs he uploaded to his own Facebook page showing Agalarov’s son, Emin, with members of the Trump family, including Donald and Ivanka.
Chaika would also seem to have a personal interest in undoing the sanctions regime set in place by the Magnitsky Law, since, The New York Times reported in 2013, the U.S. government had “a list of 280 Russians compiled by Mr. Magnitsky’s family for possible sanctions, including senior officials like Yuri Y. Chaika, the country’s general prosecutor.”
Four days after they attended that meeting at Trump Tower, Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin were in Washington to continue their campaign against the sanctions legislation, first by screening a documentary attacking Magnitsky himself, and then having dinner with Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican congressman from California who has worked to undercut the law.
The following day, both Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin were seen at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Russia when Rohrabacher spoke in favor of closer relations with Russia.
Veselnitskaya, wearing a tan dress and frequently staring at her phone, sat directly behind Michael McFaul, the Obama administration’s former ambassador to Russia, and Akhmetshin was photographed at the side of the room.
The day after that hearing, on June 15, 2016, the hacker who called himself Guccifer 2.0 posted opposition research and donor documents stolen from the servers of the Democratic National Committee. The U.S. intelligence community later concluded that hackers working for Russian intelligence were behind the theft of those documents and emails provided to WikiLeaks that served to undercut the Clinton campaign.
Top photo: Donald Trump Jr. spoke at a rally for Republican Greg Gianforte in Bozeman, Montana, on April 22.
Woooow CNN and BBC report a hidden meeting between Trump and Putin that took place at a G20 dinner table. They have no,clue what was discussed….must have been very secret and suspicious. The other world leaders at the table are to afraid to speak out on what happened. Thank you CNN and BBC for another ‘beauty’ making yourselves ridiculous again !
So, Dana and Donald were coordinating so they could get the emails unleashed? When do we find out what George Cottrell had to do with this mess? UKIP’s money launderer who got arrested leaving the US with Farage after ythe GP convention using a false name?
Amazing how anyting Russia is now deemed evil. Would this make any difference if it was a British lawyer? It’s amazing to see how many Americans are willing to get on board with the anti-Russia crap. You are gobling up all the bs the IC wants to feed you. Instead of running on ideas, the left is now running on anti-Russian and pro-interventionist/pro-empire….
So, are you suggesting that we just follow the Trump statement that the Russian thing is fake news?
all the intel suggests that the russians were trying to make mike pence president
the lies and deception … they go so deep
Your comment suggests that you are prone to producing conspiracy theories in a troll-like fashion with no fact or reason behind them in very much the same manner as a child would color outside the lines without any care but to amuse themselves.
Waaaw another secret meeting took place between Russian agents and the Trump team…..and Mackey found proof on Facebook. Journalism at its peak !
Robert,
The recent reporting by yourself and others at The Intercept has helped rehabilitate the organization’s reputation after the damage done to it by Glenn Greenwald’s reckless journalism months ago asserting that Trump-Russia 2016 campaign collusion was utterly baseless “fake news”. This was incredibly disappointing to me, as I had had tremendous respect for Glenn based on his courageous and important reporting on the documents leaked by Snowden. Robert, you have helped restore my trust in The Intercept.
Don’t be too harsh on Mr. Greenwald. In retrospect, it may be obvious that Americans did not choose two such unappealing candidates such as Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton as major party nominees. But many people at the time just felt this was American democracy at work and that voters were somehow complicit in selecting the candidates. It is a relief to learn that American democracy has not sunk to quite that depth, and that the Russians were in fact responsible.
Mr. Greenwald lives in Brazil, and maybe his lack of direct contact with American voters contributed to his believing the slanderous accusations made against them. Whatever the reason, it is clear that Mr. Greenwald misjudged the citizens of the United States and owes them an apology.
A lot of attention has been paid to how the Russians supported Mr. Trump by revealing facts about Mrs. Clinton. But not enough attention has been paid to how the Russians manipulated the DNC into selecting the only candidate who could have lost to Mr. Trump. Does it seem likely they hacked the DNC servers and then merely passively handed over the e-mails? Or is it more likely they injected their own fake e-mails into the system, tricking the DNC leadership into thinking their colleagues all supported Mrs. Clinton? Thus, although each individual probably realized that Mrs. Clinton was a disaster, they, as they had been trained, supinely accepted what they imagined to be the consensus opinion.
Journalists, as usual, are reporting only one half the story – Russian support for Mr. Trump. But an opportunity exists for Mr. Greenwald, or some other iconoclast, to tell the other half of the story, the Russian support for Mrs. Clinton.
“tell the other half of the story, the Russian support for Mrs. Clinton”
indeed! . . thanks for sticking around Benito :)
There is nothing reckless about Glenn Greenwald’s assertion that the Trump-Russsian collusion story is baseless – i.e.there is zero hard evidence and everything else is pure speculation, mostly by players that have a stake in the outcome. If the DNC, the intelligence agencies or the various congressional committees investigating this had the goods, we’d know it. And as far as the latest titbit about Donald Jr meeting with a Russian lawyer and lobbyist, the notion that this is a serious threat to American democracy is absurd. Apart from the fact that the meeting delivered nothing of substance, how many meetings have all politicians of both major parties had with foreign players who could possibly benefit their political aspirations? I mentioned a number of cases including Clinton’s campaign benefactors hiring a former MI-6 spy to dig up dirt of Trump from Russian government forces in an earlier post. And when it comes to undermining our great democracy, the US does a pretty good job of that on its own without outside assistance – from the DNC’s sabotaging of the Sanders campaign to Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression.
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Starring Donald Trump, his entire Family and all his Friends!
It WON’T be on TV, so you WON’T have the option to change the channel! It WILL be in your “Real Life” so you WON’T miss it!
“The Grifters! The Ransacking of America!”
Brought to you by: The Russian Government!
Promoted to you in the “Language of Propaganda” by “MainShitMedia!” (MSM)
Regards,
KMA
so more of mackey (drunk?) typing from his office
https://cdn.thinglink.me/api/image/272827291183087617/1240/10/scaletowidth
and discussing the subject of the headline for maybe 5% of the actual article.
if you ever wandered the streets of DC and talked to actual people with actual knowledge instead of “@punditbro69″ and “@littlehandsLOL” on twitter you might find out that akhmetshin has met with more lobbyists and staffers in a week than some members of congress do in a month. he’s a wheeler dealer type bloke. dodgy but not much else, innit.
nothing happened here that hasn’t happened 500 times a day since the republic was spawned and plopped down in a filthy swampland built for parasites and bottom feeders. do some actual reporting. or not. enough with this here rubbish in any case.
Spot on!
Trump’s not Hillary, making Putin most willing to put some dezinformatsiya operatives on the case.
We can now add the oligarchy, mostly Putin buddies, money laundering with Trump happily flogging real estate to them. Note that $6 million made a $230,000,000 case, defended by none other than Veselnitskaya, go away after Trump fired Bharara
What’s wrong with trying to get sanctions removed, especially with the vexed Magnitsky foolishness. How would we like to have sanctions slapped on us for the Great Recession or all those killed by Clinton’s sanctions on Iraq and the current invasions, bombing and occupying of so many countries? But, hey, it’s good to be an empire, right?
Russians attempting to remove sanctions on Russians is unAmerican.
It is interesting that your comment supports Russian attempts to remove sanctions placed on them by the U.S. Is there some reason that you would share that would help to define your support more thoroughly?
The latest revelation about the Trump campaign’s secret meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya on June 9, 2016,
Secret meeting? In what way was it secret?
I thought the Modus Operandi of anyone in Politics and the Media was to find all the dirt on their opponents and that includes you Mackey.
So why is Trump the only one being singled out?
Noone batted anything when Hillary sought dirt on the UN.
I;m kinda loving the alledged lovefest between Russia and Donald. Anything that stops the neocons getting WW3 is ok in my booke.
Russia must have to stand back in awe at the dirt Israel has on the American Senators and other famiLIARS in Washington and its whoremongering Agencies.
My heart goes out to Glenn Greenwald………time to move to another outlet Glenn
This is ludicrous – a sleazy music publicist sets up and meeting with Trump Jr and mysterious Moscow lawyer promising some inside dirt on Clinton’s support from Russian oligarchs (as if we needed proof of that). The jejune idiot Trump Jr then posts back “I love it” and brings along Trump team insiders like Kushner, Paul Manafort, etc to see what’s on offer which turns up to be bupkis. The MSM calls it a bombshell! a smoking gun! Tim Kaine calls it Treason!! even though treason is a crime that involves aiding and abetting a nation with which the US is at war – something they could not even pin on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The rest of the US political class then come out and say they would never accept information from anyone associated with a foreign government. Haha. What about Nixon going to the South Vietnamese to tell them not to settle with the North under Johnson because he’d get them a better deal? Or Reagan’s campaign team going to Iran to hold off on letting the hostages go until he was in office to thwart Carter’s October Surprise? OR What about Clinton’s benefactors hiring former MI-6 agent Christopher Steele to dig up dirt on Donald Trump prior to the elections? If Trump Jr’s dopey emails and useless meetings are really part of a nefarious campaign to hijack American democracy, those trying to prove it have a very steep hill to climb.
Articles like McKay try to hide, distort, or divert from the points you made. This crew which is a proto-type Keystone cops have become master spies able to take down a democracy of over 300,000,000 people using 50 decentralized voting systems. Any mention for example of the absolutely plain text emails they used? Wow, that will surely fool the NSA, CIA, and FBI.
Exactly! I’m becoming very wary of The Intercept these days…
‘The news is real, the president is fake’ — Stephen King
So happy to see the chickens coming home to roost for our toxic president. No thanks to Glenn Greenwald, who has spent the last six months poo-pooing the Russian connection and attacking any one who dared investigate. Glad to see The Intercept is finally on the case, better late than never. Wacko Trumpsters should face the music: you’ve backed a narcissistic, moronic liar, who is all to happy to see the country go down in flames if it means he will get praise an adulation from his base.
Lol..great quote from a great author of Fiction..
The Intercept is not finally “on the case” as much as they are covering their ass and toeing the line.
You do realize that even if this is true, it’s NOT illegal! We are still only talking about a $10,000 fine. We would have to be at war with Russia for any of this to matter.
Great screen name…. look up definition of “collusion”. Why else would a former spy and current Russian lobbyist be in the meeting other than to offer a tit for tat… why is he there, please explain, “you moron”
Congratulations, your name describes you perfectly. Before you start spewing Trumps witch-hunt mantra, what we are talking about is investigating whether there was a quid quo pro for Russian help in the election, which would be a crime, and there is plenty of smoke to indicate there was. As is typical in crimes committed by morons, the more you investigate the more comes out. One glaring reason to suspect quid pro quo is the nonstop lying by everyone in this administration about Russia. Lastly, impeachment is a political not a criminal procedure, and if this keeps up, that’s where we are headed.
Mr. Mackey
Interesting article.
At this point, I don’t buy that the Russians were setting the conditions for their help. Putin’s support for Trump during the campaign was based on realpolitik i.e., it was politically advantageous to Russia for numerous reasons which have been pointed out numerous times to undercut HRC. Veselnitskaya is no doubt connected to the Russian government, but so far there has been nothing to connect her to the theft of the DNC emails which Russian intelligence handed over to the RT puppet, Julian Assange. She most likely represented a separate front to lobby Trump through the willing Trump Jr. Various methods were employed by the Russian government to influence the election including fake news, the DNC hack, potentially illegal lobbying etc.
there is nothing that I hate more, than a conspiracy theory, like the Pizza restaurant that was trading in little kids, just like no way did junior meet anyone. Prove it baby. Somehow , crimes were proven even before Clinton lost the election, yet , now we doubt facts and our Impeccable Family Trump. News flash, The Trumps always tell the truth, And the Clintons are proven liars
Ah..deja vu all over again
https://theintercept.com/2016/12/06/disinformation-not-fake-news-got-trump-elected/
How did the intercept miss this story? Must have been that ?
Bear in mind that Akhmetshin is an American citizen and the claim that he is tied in with Russian intelligence is a rumor, not fact. Personally, if I was a Democrat, I’d be very, very worried about the contents of the folder that was passed to Trump. Adam Schiff may be shitting in his mess kit with his desire to see what was in it.
That feller Rinat . . . sure looks like Al Franken to me. The conspiracy rolls on. Oh,and by the way, what’s this “dirt” they have on Clinton? Is it about her dealings with the Russkies? That would be funny!
Will there ever be anything reporting or claims that doesn’t have the odious Browder involved??
Even the photos being circulated and included in this article are attributed to Browder.
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/04/29/no-dissent-from-anti-russian-propaganda/
Blast auto correct…
Will there ever be any reporting…
“My daddy is the President,” said Trump Mark 2 from his play pen. “And he will protect me so I can do anything I want and nothing will happen.”
Every day new revelations about this administration’s crimes and corruption emerge, and every day we have to stand by and see NO ONE do anything about it. I mean these people are so emboldened and feel so safe that nothing will happen to them that they are not even denying their crimes anymore. On the contrary, they public brag about it and post incrimination correspondence on their twitter. That is the most alarming thing to me.
And I mean why should they worry? Who is going to stop them? The Democrats were useless when they had the numbers so you can only imagine how much more useless they are now and Republicans found their kingpin in Trump and there is pretty much nothing he can that would make them draw the line.
For the record, the things happening here, in such an overt and blatant way, are unheard of and unprecedented. Sure politics is dirty work, but openly colluding with a foreign power to influence US elections? That is a huge deal yet it has been pretty much normalized by Trump’s criminal administration and the equally corrupt Congress members of the GOP running interference for him and covering up his crimes. When is enough enough? It is hard to just blame Trump when he has got so many people covering up for him.
This just proves my point that Trump is the endgame of 40 years of abuse by both Democrats and Republicans. Democrats lost because of it and Republicans have gotten more emboldened and vicious. Trump is the inevitable Republican. He isnt an outlier or anomaly. He is exactly where you’d expect GOP leadership to be.
“The latest revelation..”? Until the next revelation?.. so you too will have written your own book of revelations Bobby boy
The 1st Revelation of Saint John the Divine. the last book of the New Testament, containing visionary descriptions of heaven, of conflicts between good and evil, and of the end of the world.
Its hard to reconcile the two different views of Russia in the fevered insular mind of the US
On the one hand, Russia… a fifth rate petrol station masquerading as a country, its economy in tatters, its population in serious decline, demoralised, dying early, alchoholic, a one trick pony on its last legs
And the Russia that managed to effect regime change without a shot fired,by using mass hypnosis, foresight bordering on sorcery,the ability to hack and send material to Wikileaks with the NSA spluttering and helpless to pinpoint the moment that info was sent.
The CIA wants some of this magic
What all of this does show is how weak and hopeless and gullible America has become, how lacking in credibility its media.
Astonishing the power that is ascribed to Putin, and how many insiders to Putins exclusive circle there seems to be!
Any Russian who has contact with an American who ends up in the news, has, apparently connections with Putin’s inner circle, which rather defeats the purpose of exclusivity
I suspect the overblown seedy English music promoter falsely described the lawyer and her info to make the meeting happen
Agree with you
I go over the connection between this meeting and the Magnitsky Act in great details in this article and show that it’s a lot more complicated than what people are saying. In particular, even if Veselnitskaya really knows Chaika (which is unclear), I point out that it would be extremely surprising if the Kremlin had used her to broker a deal with Trump and that there is a much more natural explanation, which also agrees more with the available evidence. I also point out that RFE/RL reported last year that Akhmetshin had been working for the nonprofit Veselnitskaya set up in Delaware to lobby against the Magnitsky Act on behalf of Prevezon for years, so his presence at this meeting is hardly surprising, especially given that Veselnitskaya doesn’t speak a word of English.
Thanks for the link
I’m a great fan of your writing having just discovered it.Good to know there’s still investigative journalism with integrity
You’re welcome, I’m glad you like it. Please share it if you found it enlightening! I would like more people to read a sober discussion of this story.
Thank you
You’re most welcome.
Maybe not, but his presence seemed to have been overlooked by everyone at the meeting.
Excellent article. This quote by you summarizes the state of journalism around the so-called Russian scandal
There is a singular lack of basic sense of incredulity, which seems to me to be at the heart of investigative journalism. Stepping back, we are to believe that this crew was the spear tip of collusion with the Trump campaign when the principle cannot speak English, and all communication is done by plain unencrypted email. And now it seems had meetings with a good number of people. Yah, very secret meeting.
But it is not just in this meeting. It started when Crowdstrike claimed the Russians hacked the DNC server because they found a file with Cyrillic file with the name of Dzerzhinsky in it. Russians are that careless and stupid? Or when claiming that phishing uniquely identified Russian secret services. Reporters could not even bother to learn about basic hacking techniques. Or the claim that the Rust Belt states were targeted for a fake news onslaught when not one expert in the United States thought the Rust Belt states were in play. How did Putin gain these powers of ESP to realize they were in play? Or in the case of Christopher Steele who could waltz into the teeth of Putin’s authoritarian regime and have intelligence agents gladly give him what would surely are some of the most trusted state secrets.
As for the “rumors” and “ties” to the Kremlin. Well, that that has reached the level where any contract with any Russian for any reason is immediate proof of sedition and treason. It is basically a form or McCarthyite attack as it is an extreme form of total guilt by mere association in any manner.
Indeed, I have also discussed in details the hack of the DNC in another post, where among other things I made that point about “Dzerzhinsky”.
It’s all perfectly ordinary. So why the stream of lies coming from everyone involved in it? Why the constantly changing story? We are up to 8 participants now. It started with 4.
Any investigator knows that when stories change and people lie there is something going on.
For the full story of the MURDER of Sergei Magnitsky go to the following link;
http://www.billbrowder.com/sergei-magnitsky
Also read the book: RED NOTICE:
Meetings with tRUMP campaign minions Trump Jr., Kushner, and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort met with Natalia Veselnitskay and Russian Representative about repealing the Magnitsky Act is TREASON!!!!!
If you really want a fuller picture , you would be wise to check out the doco The Magnitsky Case behind the scenes
This was made by a much acclaimed(outside of Russia)liberal film maker, Andrei Nekrasov, who is much opposed to Putin
Nekrasov thought the Bill Browder story would be a fine one to demonstrate the evils of Putin and the Russian state
Instead, halfway through, he found Browder’s narrative to be riven with inconsistencies and lies
The doco ended quite differently from how it started
Bill Browder has gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent its public viewings
It can be found now on you Tube
I have a very similar high profile case where I was tortured and abused and trafficked . Any interested lawyers please get in touch. http://Www.davidhaigh.co.uk. [email protected]
Mackeys last statement…US Intelligence community concluding Hackers from Russian Intelligence community were behind the theft of documents and emails provided to Wikileaks … When my 5year old accuses his 4year old brother of eating all the cookies….guess who did it ?
Are you accusing the US government of eating your 4-year old’s cookies?
I found the timing of the reopening of the Clinton investigation by former FBI director Comey quite telling….. Just what the Trump campaign needed, don’t you think ?
I agree with that 100%, but that doesn’t absolve the Russian government at all. As I mentioned in my first post, there is ample evidence of Russian interference in the US election on multiple levels. I don’t care if only one US intelligence agency had high confidence that Putin ordered the hacked DNC emails handed over to Assange, they were spot on.
A Mackey article not made by cutting and pasting stuff from his Twitter feed? It must be a miracle.
Well, it’s still a whole lot of nothing, but one step at a time, I guess.