Team Trump’s stumbling defense of Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer has unraveled so badly in recent days that even Fox News is hard pressed to find a legal analyst who backs the White House.
The network’s senior judicial analyst, Andrew Napolitano, refuted the White House’s latest legal defense on Monday morning.
“It is a crime to receive something of value when you are a campaign official from a foreign person or foreign government,” Napolitano said. “Is this enough to commence a criminal investigation? Answer: yes. Because it is suspicious that they met with these people, that they didn’t consult a lawyer, that one of these people is former KGB-GRU — that’s the Russian intelligence arm.”
Napolitano went on to ask, “Why didn’t Jared Kushner tell the FBI about it unless he was trying to hide something?”
In recent days, the president has posted multiple Twitter defenses of his son, who along with his brother-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort attended meeting at Trump Tower with Kremlin-linked attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya and other associates in an effort to get opposition research on Hillary Clinton.
“That’s politics,” Trump insisted on Monday. Trump argued that “most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don Jr attended in order to get info on an opponent.”
As Ronald Reagan once explained, however, there’s an old rule in politics: “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” Trump’s defense of his campaign’s actions have evolved so quickly — from denial to lying to a norm-debasing rationalization — that it appears that he may fully know he’s losing.