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"Never heard of him": the Tangerine Tyrant's memory fails at the precise moment his son needs an alibi

• ProPublica reports a Putin-linked oligarch secretly paid hundreds of thousands towards Don Jr's Bahamas wedding celebration
• A private island. A fireworks display over the ocean. For a man the family says he met only recently
• Dad skipped the wedding, then told the Daily Beast he has no idea who the oligarch is
• The House Oversight Committee's top Democrat has opened an inquiry citing national security and corruption concerns

Here is the bit that gets me. Not the oligarch. Not the island. The sentence.

"I have no idea who he is."

A reporter puts it to the Tangerine Tyrant of the United States that a sanctioned Russian businessman close to Vladimir Putin quietly paid for a chunk of his eldest son's wedding weekend, and the answer is a shrug and a memory lapse.

Then, for good measure, the White House clarifies that it was not the *wedding*, you see. It was the party held in their honour afterwards. Entirely different thing.

Sure. And I didn't buy you dinner, I merely paid for everything you ate.

WHAT IS ACTUALLY ON THE RECORD

ProPublica named him: Umar Kremlev, head of the International Boxing Association, close to Putin. He rented a private island in the Bahamas. He paid for a fireworks show out over the ocean. Hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Trump Jr's spokesman did not dispute the payments. He called Kremlev a personal friend, and said there is no business relationship. Kremlev's press office says the men are friendly and that he has never discussed politics with his American friends.

His new wife called it a generous wedding gift.

Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on House Oversight, has written to Trump Jr saying that secretive and exorbitant gifts from a member of Putin's inner circle to the son of a sitting president raise serious national security and public corruption concerns.

That is the file. Everything past that line is somebody's theory, including the theories I enjoy, and I am not going to dress them up as reporting.

THE FATHER THING

I am told repeatedly that this is a close family. A family business. A family brand.

The man did not go to his son's wedding. He was, we are told, busy with a war. And when the story broke, his first move was not to defend his boy but to put four thousand miles of daylight between them.

Whatever that is, it is not a family. It is a table of counterparties who happen to share a surname.

AND THE WIDER SMELL

Because it does not sit alone, does it. A venture firm the Gilded Toddler's son joined days after the election takes a stake in a tiny magnet startup, and a few months later the Pentagon hands that startup a $620million loan of your money.

I cannot prove a line runs from one to the other, and I am not going to pretend I can. But I notice that when this family is in the room, the taxpayer is always the one holding the coat.

Never heard of him. Wasn't there. Wasn't the wedding, was the afterparty.

Remember all that the next time you are told that the family is off limits.