Bad Oppo, Secret Service Fail: Defenses Of Don Jr. Meeting Don't Square
By ALLEGRA KIRKLAND Published JULY 17, 2017 12:08 PM
A White House not exactly known for its message discipline is fumbling its response to Donald Trump, Jr.’s meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer during the 2016 campaign, with new explanations that arise on a near-daily basis become increasingly harder to square with each other.
While maintaining its original defense, that the President himself did not know about the meeting, the Trump administration and the President’s team of outside lawyers have offered up a slew of additional and at times conflicting rationalizations for it. Since the rendezvous was first reported just over a week ago, it has been justified as standard political opposition research; cast as part of a Democratic smear campaign; defended as the naïve undertaking of a 39-year-old “good kid” trying to help his father; and, most recently, blamed on the U.S. Secret Service.
The Trump team’s first response to the June 2016 meeting between Trump Jr., his brother-in-law and White House adviser Jared Kushner, then-campaign manager Paul Manafort and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was to blame the Democrats. Mark Corallo, spokesman for Trump’s legal team, told the New York Times that Veselnitskaya and her fellow guests “misrepresented who they were,” and noted that she had worked with a firm that Democratic operatives retained to produce opposition research on Trump.
The President himself remained quiet, and stayed that way as damaging details about the true purpose of the meeting trickled out. After Trump Jr. got ahead of the Times by releasing a chain of emails via Twitter that revealed a bombshell—he’d attended a meeting expressly billed as an opportunity to obtain damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help his father’s campaign— Corallo would say only that Trump “was not aware of and did not attend” the meeting.
When Trump finally spoke out in support of his son in the middle of last week, he described him as a political neophyte who just was trying to help the campaign. He praised Trump Jr.’s “transparency” for publishing the entire email chain in which the meeting was arranged, praising him as a “high-quality person” and “good kid.”
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