Collusion

I'm about halfway through the book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, by Luke Harding. Along with events from the title, Harding presents a bio of Christopher Steele, the man who prepared the famous dossier. For me it's interesting to read that Steele's father had been a weather forecaster, and his grandfather a coal miner.
The book's sixth chapter is, among other things, about Paul Manafort's relationship with the Russian aluminum oligarch Oleg Deripaska. There is a quote from a Manafort email to an intermediary on July 7, 2016, in which the campaign manager offered to provide the aluminum oligarch with private briefings about the campaign. (The book expands on close ties to Putin.)
Whenever I have been hearing aluminum oligarch in connection with the ongoing investigations, I have been thinking about the Trump campaign appearance in Monessen, Pennsylvania, last year. Comedians at the time had fun with the bizarre scene of Trump standing amid bales of scrap aluminum prepared for recycling. A day after that event I commented in a post (mostly workplace memories from a long ago summer). Unsure if I remembered correctly the exact date, I later found an online news story, dateline MONESSEN (KDKA/AP). The Monessen speech was on Tuesday, June 28, 2016.
According to the news story, the appearance was a policy speech on free trade, where Trump outlined a seven-point plan to restore America's trade position. I don't recall or see in the news story any points of a plan, just the usual platitudes. In my earlier comment, I thought it odd to be celebrating bundling scrap for shipment to somewhere else. There were 200 invited guests according to the news story, with another 100 outside, half of them protesters (some of them from my hometown). The town of Monessen itself is not a Trump stronghold. In fact the mayor, who acknowledged inviting Trump to Monessen, was defeated for re-election this year.
There are so many odd things about that appearance in Monessen. It was as if the campaign manager's main objective was to have the candidate seen in a photo op with the bales of scrap aluminum. Perhaps that visual message was intended for a certain foreign country.