Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
During a Tuesday morning appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” author and former federal prosecutor Preet Bharara was asked to weigh in on possible legal problems that Donald Trump Jr. could be facing—and he responded that from a legal standpoint, the president’s son might be in “jeopardy.”
Special Counsel Robert Mueller, as part of his Russia probe, has been investigating a June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting in New York City that included Trump Jr. as well as the Trump Organization’s Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort (President Trump’s former campaign manager), and several others, including Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya. Subsequently, Trump Jr. testified about his Russian contacts when he testified before the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017.
Co-host Joe Scarborough asked Bharara, “Given what you know about Donald Trump Jr., his testimony before Congress, would you bring charges of perjury against Donald Trump Jr.?” And the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York responded, “I haven’t seen all the evidence. As a former prosecutor, I don’t like to second-guess decisions and anticipate necessarily. I don’t know enough about what his intent was.”
Bharara added, however, “But I do think, though, based on his testimony and some other things, that Donald Trump Jr. is in jeopardy.”
Bharara (author of the new book Doing Justice: A Prosecutor’s Thoughts on Crime, Punishment and the Rule of Law) went on to say that if Trump Jr. were to face legal peril, “we’re all in jeopardy, because if something were to befall, in a criminal sense, Donald Trump Jr., I don’t know what his father is capable of.”
In December 2017, Trump Jr. testified that in June 2016, his father knew nothing about the Trump Tower meeting. But Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney and fixer, has disputed that clam.
