President Trump’s eldest son admitted on July 9 to meeting with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 presidential campaign, after she promised him damaging information about Hillary Clinton. The revelation comes after months of the White House denying campaign contacts with Russians. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
After claiming for months that no representative of President Trump’s political campaign met with Russians who wanted to meddle in the 2016 election, the White House needs a new argument.
Donald Trump Jr. on Sunday confirmed a New York Times report that he, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort agreed to meet last June with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer who purported to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton. His admission means that a lawyer who represents businesses owned by the Russian government wanted to inject harmful information about Clinton into the U.S. presidential race and that members of the Trump campaign were willing to help.
[Donald Trump Jr. just contradicted a whole bunch of White House denials of Russian contacts]
Now that denying the occurrence of such a meeting is no longer feasible, Team Trump’s revised strategy — part of it, anyway — is to contend that the meeting was just a standard attempt to collect opposition research. We’ve heard that argument directly from Trump Jr. and from unofficial surrogates, such as CNN commentator Jeffrey Lord.
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. https://t.co/ccUjL1KDEa
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 10, 2017
Newsflash? Campaigns of all stripes collect dirt on opponents. It’s called “oppo research” as in “opposition”. HRC and Dems did to Trump.
— Jeff Lord (@realJeffreyLord) July 10, 2017
Richard Painter, a former chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, told MSNBC on Sunday that there is nothing normal about accepting an offer of assistance from someone with such close ties to a foreign power.
“We do not get our opposition research from spies,” Painter said. “We do not collaborate with Russian spies unless we want to be accused of treason. … The Bush administration never would have tolerated this, and if this story is true, we’d have one of them, if not both of them in custody by now, and we’d be asking them a lot of questions because this is unacceptable.”
The Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, told the Times that she did not act on behalf of the Russian government when she met with Trump Jr.
Besides the opposition-research argument, the White House has a potpourri basket of talking points related (kind of) to the meeting. Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway gave at least a half dozen during an appearance on CNN Monday.
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‘It was vague, ambiguous, completely meaningless’
Conway said the information Veselnitskaya provided to Trump Jr. was useless — as if the underwhelming outcome of the meeting nullifies Trump Jr.’s motivation for taking it.
CNN messed up on a different story last month
Trump Jr. on Saturday acknowledged meeting with Veselnitskaya but did not disclose until Sunday, after further reporting by the New York Times, that he went in expecting compromising info about Clinton. When CNN anchor Chris Cuomo asked Conway about the change, she brought up a June report that CNN retracted, which claimed a connection between a Trump associate and a Russian investment fund. “He added to the account of what happened in a meaningless meeting, and three of your colleagues were fired … because they went with a story that was thinly sourced,” Conway said.
No votes were altered
“Do you think that anything that you’re talking about changed a single vote anywhere?” Conway asked Cuomo. Her argument is that if the information Veselnitskaya shared with Trump Jr. did not alter votes, then that the meeting is irrelevant.
Bill Clinton delivered a paid speech in Russia in 2010
“I care about the fact that you seem to forget the Russian connections we do know about,” Conway told Cuomo. “We know Bill Clinton, not Don Jr., gave a speech in Russia for half a million dollars.”
Hillary Clinton supported a 2013 uranium deal that benefited Russia
“We know that Hillary Clinton had one of the nine votes that allowed 20 percent of the U.S. uranium rights to go” to Russia, Conway said, referring to the Russian atomic energy agency’s purchase of a controlling stake in a Canadian company with uranium-mining interests in the United States. The State Department, led by Clinton at the time, was one of nine U.S. government agencies to sign off on the deal.
Obama failed to stop Russian meddling
“We know that in the summer of 2016, the people who knew about possible Russian interference in the campaign weren’t at the Trump campaign,” Conway said. “They were in the Obama White House — none other than President Obama, John Brennan. They were informed about this. What did they do? Nothing.”
Conway was referring to last month’s Washington Post report in which some former Obama administration officials said they regretted not doing more to deter Russian meddling.
The talking points are scattered, but the White House strategy is clear: Insist that Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer was normal and try to shift attention onto some other subject that has something to do with Russia, too.