Don Jr. a chip off the old block when it comes to dealing with Russia
Like father, like son. On the same weekend Donald Trump got rolled by Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, we learned his chip off the old block, Don Jr., came within a nose hair of colluding with a fetching Kremlin-linked lawyer a year ago.
It seemed all the foibles of the Trump administration were on full display over the weekend: ego, grandiosity, psycho tweets (see John Podesta), stupid tweets and those shady, ever-changing explanations.
Few thinking Americans actually expected our president to challenge Putin over Russia’s hacking of the 2016 election. But the idea The Donald would actually team up with the KGB spymaster — who rolled over Ukraine and worked to subvert our democratic system — gave a whole new meaning to the idea of groveling.
“Putin and I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security Unit,” Trump announced in one of his nuttier tweets. Then he changed his mind less than 24 hours later.
The blowback, especially from Republicans, suggested that a Trump-Putin partnership on hacking would make about as much sense as a Donald Trump-Billy Bush partnership to study sexual harassment.
In the end, it was left to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to face the press — without cameras — and say Trump had accepted Putin’s “Nyet,” on hacking and it was time to “move on.”
But before we could take a first step away from the “Russian thing,” up pops Donnie Jr. in a front-page bombshell from the fake New York Times about a shady meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign.
It seems Junior, Paul Manafort and son-in-law/top White House adviser Jared Kushner huddled with Natalia Veselnitskaya ostensibly to discuss facilitating U.S. adoptions of Russian children.
At least that was Junior’s first account of the meeting. No big deal, just a harmless adoption thing.
Then, Junior quickly amended his tune to say what really brought him to the meeting was Natalia’s promise of producing dirt on Hillary Clinton. But when the dirt on Hillary, according to Junior, seemed “vague, ambiguous and made no sense,” Trump the Younger said he realized the Russian lawyer “had no meaningful information” worth colluding on.
But it sure looks like Junior, Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, the troika who were guiding the Trump campaign back in June 2016, were ready to see if a Russian lawyer who’s been linked to Putin’s Kremlin was worth colluding with. Otherwise, why would they have brought this Russian operative up to the penthouse of Trump Tower?
What’s heartening about this Trump family weekend is that the machinations of Donald Sr., and most especially Donald Jr., will eventually come under the microscope of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller.
Unless, of course, Donald Sr. doesn’t fire Mueller first.