A recent tweet from President Donald Trump about Don Jr’s meeting with a Russian lawyer (named Natalia Veselnitskaya) at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign has liberals claiming that Trump just confessed to collusion – but they simply aren’t paying attention.
“This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics – and it went nowhere,” Trump tweeted.
Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower. This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics – and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 5, 2018
Now compare that tweet to the headlines it generated. The New York Times headlined their story on the tweet “President Admits Focus of Trump Tower Meeting Was Getting Dirt on Clinton.” The Washington Post titled theirs “Trump admits son’s 2016 meeting with Russian lawyer was to seek ‘information on’ Clinton.”
It’s an interesting angle – because Trump sent a tweet with nearly identical information when the news of the Trump Tower meeting broke in 2017.
Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That's politics!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 17, 2017
Why didn’t the media spin this as an admission of guilt then? Did they think there would be “real” evidence of collusion by now and are just grasping at straws now?
Who knows, but the fact of the matter is that the meeting is not illegal. In fact, some would argue that the meeting was a setup by the Clintons from the get-go. The lawyer Veselnitskaya was also working with the firm behind the anti-Trump dossier ( Fusion GPS) at the time of the meeting.
Veselnitskaya met with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson the day of and the day after her meeting with Trump Jr. Veselnitskaya was working with Fusion GPS on an unrelated case to advance Russian interests, while Fusion was funded by the Clinton campaign to allege a conspiracy between Trump and the Russians. A bit suspicious, don’t you think?
Regardless of the legitimacy of the meeting, Trump Jr. still did nothing illegal, and he called into Laura Ingrahm’s radio show yesterday to debunk the notion that his father gave “conflicting statements” about the meeting. According to Mediaite: “Ingraham asked Don Jr. about that discrepancy when he called into her show on Monday, and she even aired a few clips of Trump and various officials confidently claiming the meeting was about adoptions. ‘You want any comment on that, Donny?’ the Fox News host asked. ‘Because they’re hitting you on that for contradictions––I mean, they’re calling it worse than contradictions obviously. Donny what is your reaction to all that?'”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0gFWBPh558
There were some technical difficulties apparently. Don Jr. then called back in and explained that “It was a 20-minute meeting. It ended up being about essentially nothing that was relevant to any of these things. That’s all it is and that’s all they’ve got.” He added that the conversation was primarily about Russian adoptions, despite being pitched as a meeting to share dirt on Hillary Clinton.
If the Trump Tower meeting was illegal, don’t you think there would’ve been consequences for it already? Of the Americans indicted from Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel, none faced charges that had anything to do with Russian collusion. George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn faced charges of lying to the FBI, while Rick Gates and Paul Manafort face charges of tax evasion and money laundering. If Trump Jr. broke the law, wouldn’t Mueller’s witch hunt be desperate enough to catch an actual witch that they’d have arrested him by now?
