In his interview with Reuters, Trump offered the following justification for taking the meeting with Veselnitskaya:
“Many people, and many political pros, said everybody would do that. If you got a call and said, 'Listen I have information on Hillary and the DNC,' or whatever it was they said, most people are going to take that meeting, I think."”
For the last couple days talking heads have been arguing about whether Jr.s admission that he had sought “official Russian documents” implicating Hillary’s dealings with Russia, constituted illegal solicitation of foreign campaign help. The “official documents that didn’t really exist never made any sense except as a cover story for discussion of the stuff that the Russians really had, hacked DNC emails.
The distinction is important. Russian documents legally obtained and never released are a pretty thin basis for a legal case against the campaign. The legal liability to Trump comes from statutes governing use of hacked materials under cyber crimes statutes and solicitation and facilitation of electioneering such as the Russian social media campaign.
Here once again Trump goes on national television and blurts out the truth. The meeting wasn’t about Russian documents that were never released. It was about Hillary and the DNC — the hacked emails that were released just a few weeks later to disrupt the Democratic Convention. Game over.
And since Trump just blew up the cover story that the meeting was about Russian documents the reporting that Kushner’s digital operation was guiding Russian efforts starting a week after this meeting looks like a slam dunk as well.
White house officials have been saying you can’t tell Trump anything sensitive because if he is told he cannot reveal something under any circumstances he is sure to blurt it out at the first opportunity. Guess we know it is true.