Revelation of meeting with Russian lawyer intensifies political crisis in Washington
13 July 2017
The revelation that Donald Trump Jr. met in June 2016 with a Moscow lawyer with ties to the Putin government and Russian oligarchs has become the focus of intensifying political warfare in Washington.
From the response of the Democrats and the media, one might think that Trump’s son set up the meeting to turn over the US nuclear codes to the Kremlin. In reality, it seems that Trump Jr., then a campaign adviser to his father, met Natalia Veselnitskaya to get information damaging to Hillary Clinton.
This sort of “digging for dirt” is not exactly unusual in American politics. Individuals associated with the Clinton campaign reportedly met with Ukrainian government officials in March 2016 in search of material that might discredit Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Clinton herself has connections with governments and intelligence agencies all over the world, which she no doubt sought to leverage in her contest with Trump.
In any event, Trump Jr.’s clumsy contact with a Russian lawyer doesn’t quite measure up to Nixon’s efforts, during the 1968 presidential campaign, to sabotage the Paris Peace Talks, lest the sudden end of the Vietnam War cost him votes; or Reagan’s efforts to persuade the Iranian regime not to release American hostages before Election Day in 1980.
The Trump Tower meeting, however, has acquired explosive significance in the context of the ferocious political battle that is being waged in Washington. Both Democrats and Republicans have said that the meeting with the Russian lawyer amounts to a “smoking gun” in the Trump-Russia investigations. Senator Tim Kaine, Clinton’s former running mate, said that with the meeting “we are now moving…