WaPo: Trump ‘dictated’ Junior’s lie about meeting with Russians
How does this not look even more like a clumsy cover-up? Ashley Parker, Carol D. Leonnig, Philip Rucker and Tom Hamburger share the WaPo byline:
On the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Germany last month, President Trump’s advisers discussed how to respond to a new revelation that Trump’s oldest son had met with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign — a disclosure the advisers knew carried political and potentially legal peril.
The strategy, the advisers agreed, should be for Donald Trump Jr. to release a statement to get ahead of the story. They wanted to be truthful, so their account couldn’t be repudiated later if the full details emerged.
But within hours, at the president’s direction, the plan changed.
What? Donald Trump decided to intervene and do something genuinely stupid? Perish the thought!
Flying home from Germany on July 8 aboard Air Force One, Trump personally dictated a statement in which Trump Jr. said that he and the Russian lawyer had “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children” when they met in June 2016, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deliberations. The statement, issued to the New York Times as it prepared an article, emphasized that the subject of the meeting was “not a campaign issue at the time.”
The claims were later shown to be misleading.
Those folks at WaPo have a way with understatement!
Over the next three days, multiple accounts of the meeting were provided to the news media as public pressure mounted, with Trump Jr. ultimately acknowledging that he had accepted the meeting after receiving an email promising damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help his father’s campaign.
Yeah, that is a kinda significant leap from adoptions.
WaPo published a timeline of the evolving story earlier this month that is worth bookmarking, and NPR provides a solid supplementary analysis of all those [not so] crazy coincidences here.
Meanwhile, back in tonight’s scoop…
The extent of the president’s personal intervention in his son’s response, the details of which have not previously been reported, adds to a series of actions that Trump has taken that some advisers fear could place him and some members of his inner circle in legal jeopardy.
… which could explain why Trump is freaking out over Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s reportedly expanding investigation into allegations of outright Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign Russian collusion.
“This was . . . unnecessary,” said one of the president’s advisers, who like most other people interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations. “Now someone can claim he’s the one who attempted to mislead. Somebody can argue the president is saying he doesn’t want you to say the whole truth.”
Talk about understatement. This is getting much more interesting very quickly.
