The Trump campaign's story—or rather, Donald Trump Jr.'s story, since Jared Kushner and ex-campaign-chief Paul Manafort appear to be deep in hiding—is that Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort met with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer to discuss information damaging to Hillary Clinton. We now know that the campaign knew both that the Russian government wanted to assist Trump's efforts to win the election, and that the meeting with Veselnitskaya was intended to facilitate that.
The remaining campaign defense is a rather implausible one: Don Jr. claims the Russian lawyer had no useful information after all but instead began arguing for the reversal of the Magnitsky Act, an American sanctions law against specific government-connected Russians. Don Jr. claims he then left the meeting and there was no follow up. But is that true?
On Monday morning, Mr. Trump Jr. wrote on Twitter, “Obviously I’m the first person on a campaign to ever take a meeting to hear info about an opponent... went nowhere but had to listen.” [...]
A person close to the Trump campaign recalled getting an email around the time of the meeting with the Russian attorney asking about the campaign’s stance on the Magnitsky Act. The person could not recall if they responded to the email, or whether it was before or after the meeting took place.
Just six days after the campaign meeting with Veselnitskaya, Russia began the public release of information stolen from the Democratic National Committee. Several weeks after that, the Trump campaign went to unusual lengths (that is, were noted as unusual even at the time) to weaken the Republican Party's own official stance on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Russian release of DNC information soon intensified; Donald Trump himself responded with his infamous press conference-televised invitation to Russia to "find" emails from Hillary Clinton directly.
The one remaining thread of the Trump campaign's own admission that they attempted collusion with Russian government efforts to disrupt the election is the claim that nothing ever came of it. But that assertion is itself, at this point, implausible. The campaign indeed took actions that were favorable to the Russian government after the June meeting. Donald Trump's own defense of the Russian government, whether it be his bizarre continued insistence that perhaps Russia was not behind the hacking at all or his repeated campaign trail and administration statements seeking to loosen sanctions imposed on Russia for those hacks, for their annexation of Ukrainian territory, or for the litany of human rights abuses (translation: murders) that have marked Russian leader Vladimir Putin's regime.
The circumstantial evidence that the Trump campaign not only sought out an campaign alliance with Russian government efforts but then acted to benefit the Russian government after the June meeting arranged to discuss it is overwhelming. There's every indication this story is about to get even worse.