Trump Admits Meeting With Russians Was About Campaign Dirt

Before the weekend gets away from us, let’s make sure everyone understands what happened today with Donald Trump.   The President, on vacation at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club, acknowledged via Twitter this that the now infamous meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 was about getting some “information on an opponent.”

That is much different than we’ve been told before.  According to The Washington Post:

• “President Trump on Sunday offered his most definitive and clear public acknowledgment that his oldest son met with a Kremlin-aligned lawyer at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign to “get information on an opponent,” defending the meeting as “totally legal and done all the time in politics.”
• “It is, however, against the law for U.S. campaigns to receive donations or items of value from foreigners, and that June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Natalia Veselnitskaya is now a subject of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia probe.”

Trump tweeted that he didn’t know about the meeting, although his former attorney Michael Cohen said that’s not true.  Donald Trump, Jr. had said in 2017 the meeting was not about “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

• “Trump’s tweet, however, conflicts with a statement that Trump Jr. had released to the New York Times in July 2017, as the newspaper prepared to report about the meeting. In that statement, Trump Jr. had indicated that the meeting had been “primarily” about the issue of the adoption of Russian children by Americans.”

The New York Times reports that tweets like this could mean real trouble for Trump, his son and his son-in-law Jared Kushner who was also at the meeting.

• “People close to the president believe that he may be increasing his legal jeopardy by continuing to speak publicly about sensitive matters even as his campaign is under investigation for possible collusion with Russia and he himself is under scrutiny for possible obstruction of justice. Just last week, Mr. Trump said in a tweet that Attorney General Jeff Sessions should shut down the special counsel investigation.”