Democracy Has Prevailed.

July 10, 2017

Wow. Just Wow. Trump Jr./Russia/Collusion. Wow.

The Guardian, May 19, 2017. When asked about former FBI Director Robert Mueller being appointed a special counsel to investigate contacts between his campaign and Russia, Donald J Trump said:
“I respect the move, but the entire thing has been a witch hunt. There is no collusion – certainly myself and my campaign – but I can always speak for myself and the Russians – zero,” he said at a joint press conference with the Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos.
It's getting harder to say that this is true, isn't it?

What with this being published this week in the New York Times:
President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign, according to three advisers to the White House briefed on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it.
Whether any damaging information was offered by Natalia Veselnitskaya (that "Kremlin-connected Russian Lawyer), is not the point. Whether she believed that the meeting was about the Clinton campaign is also not the point.

The point is that Trump Jr went to the meeting after being promised Clinton dirt. That was his intention. He even said so:
I was asked to have a meeting by an acquaintance I knew from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant with an individual who I was told might have information helpful to the campaign.
You'll note that his second explanation differs from his first (and only one day old) explanation of the meeting:
It was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up.
If you want to know what he did by leaving out all the Russian stuff, you can look it up: it's called a "lie by omission."

Makes you wonder what else he's omitting.

It also means Trump's father can't pass this off as "fake news" as his own son admitted that "the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting."

Fake news this'll never be.

Then there's this from The Hill:
An ethics lawyer under former President George W. Bush blasted Donald Trump Jr. for meeting with a Russian lawyer who claimed to have compromising information on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton during the campaign, saying it “borders on treason.”

“This was an effort to get opposition research on an opponent in an American political campaign from the Russians, who were known to be engaged in spying inside the United States,” Richard Painter said Sunday on MSNBC.

“We do not get our opposition research from spies, we do not collaborate with Russian spies, unless we want to be accused of treason.”

Painter said the Bush administration would not have allowed the meeting, which was attended by Trump Jr., White House senior adviser and President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, to happen.

“If this story is true, we’d have one of them if not both of them in custody by now, and we’d be asking them a lot of questions,” he said. “This is unacceptable. This borders on treason, if it is not itself treason.”
Borders on treason.

Lock him up! Lock him up! Lock him up!

2 comments:

Social Justice NPC Anti-Paladin™ said...

"An ethics lawyer under former President George W. Bush blasted Donald Trump Jr. for meeting with a Russian lawyer who claimed to have compromising information on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton during the campaign, saying it “borders on treason.”

Richard Painter is the vice-chairman of the Progressive group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)

Ol' Froth said...

So?