Donald Trump issued a rare statement to a news organization writing a piece about his son, Don Jr., in which Trump clearly distanced himself even further from his son’s 2016 Trump Tower meeting to get dirt on Hillary Clinton from a Kremlin-connected lawyer.
“Don has received notoriety for a brief meeting, that many politicians would have taken," Trump wrote to the Washington Post, "but most importantly, and to the best of my knowledge, nothing happened after the meeting concluded."
This is clearly lawyer speak—since when have you ever heard Trump use a nuanced phrase like "to the best of my knowledge"? Never, that's when. What Trump has done in the past is distance himself from knowing about the meeting and then dismiss it as unimportant because it never produced results. In a tweet last week, for instance, after calling Don Jr.'s effort to get dirt on Hillary from a foreign government a "totally legal" endeavor that "went nowhere," Trump added, "I did not know about it!"
That makes Trump's latest statement, issued with the help of his lawyers, interesting in two respects: 1) he didn't reiterate not having knowledge of the meeting, an omission that may or may not prove meaningful; 2) instead of saying the meeting went nowhere, he said it went nowhere to the best of his knowledge—a caveat leaving open the possibility that the meeting indeed went somewhere. Trump, or at least his lawyer, is simply trying to insulate himself from the possibility that the meeting in fact yielded something presumably valuable for his campaign—something that could amount to collusion.
As former federal prosecutor Harry Litman told Nicolle Wallace Monday on MSNBC, "Obviously people on Team Trump think that there is something concrete that's going emerge about dirt having been possibly produced."
It’s just a waiting game, folks. We keep getting bread crumbs from Trump, his lawyers, and his allies on the trail to piecing together what the special counsel’s findings will eventually be. This appears to be another significant clue that whatever Robert Mueller might conclude is something Trump has cause to worry about.