Reprinted with permission from Shareblue.
In a stunning confession Sunday morning, Trump said that the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting attended by his son, son-in-law, and campaign chair was in fact designed to “get information” on Hillary Clinton from Russian agents.
By saying this, Trump is admitting that he lied when he dictated a statement for his son, Donald Trump Jr., that claimed the purpose of the Trump Tower meeting was to discuss a law about Russian adoptions.
More importantly, however, Trump may have just admitted that his campaign colluded with a foreign power to influence the 2016 elections.
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
Trump also claimed that he “did not know” about the meeting in advance, and that meetings like this are “totally legal and done all the time in politics.”
But meetings like this are not, in fact, “done all the time in politics.”
It’s one thing for a campaign to purchase opposition research on an opponent, even if that information comes from a foreign source.
It’s quite another for a campaign to meet with foreign government operatives in hopes of receiving valuable information — which could violate campaign finance laws against soliciting things of value from foreign nationals.
Trump’s damning tweet appears to have been a reaction to reports by CNN and the Washington Post that Trump is worried about his son being in legal jeopardy.
One Trump adviser told the Post that Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has told Trump that special counsel Robert Mueller is “bluffing with a pair of 2’s” — that Mueller doesn’t have anything on Trump or his family.
Giuliani is apparently letting Trump believe the deluded fiction that the entire Russia investigation really is a witch hunt and a hoax.
Trump seems to have no idea just how much trouble he might be getting himself into — and his lawyer doesn’t seem to either.
Published with permission of The American Independent.
