Son may have solicited illegal gift, scholars say
It’s illegal for a U.S. political campaign to ask a foreign person or government for “anything of value” — and that’s what Donald Trump Jr. appears to have done in agreeing to meet with a Russian government lawyer during his father’s presidential campaign, legal and ethics scholars said Tuesday.
Trump Jr.’s newly revealed emails about a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in New York, also attended at his invitation by Jared Kushner, the candidate’s son-in-law and adviser, and Paul Manafort, his father’s campaign chairman, lay out “a serious case ... of solicitation” of an illegal foreign contribution, Richard Hasen, a professor of election law at UC Irvine, said in a blog post.
Hasen noted Trump Jr’s response when a
friend with Russian connections emailed him that a lawyer from the Russian government could provide the campaign with “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary (Clinton) and her dealings with Russia.”
“If that’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” the candidate’s son replied.
In that message, Hasen said, Trump Jr. appears to be asking for information “of value” to the campaign that he knows is from a foreign source. “There’s a lot for prosecutors to sink their teeth into. Pretty close to the smoking gun people were looking for,” Hasen said.
It might even have been treason, said Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor who was White House ethics counsel under President George W. Bush.
“We clearly have a foreign adversary who is acting in a hostile way to the United States,” Painter said in an interview. “If any Americans sought to collude with Russia to help to accomplish these objectives, that would easily meet the common definition of treason.”
Although Trump Jr. was not formally affiliated with the campaign, Kushner and Manafort were, and the candidate’s son clearly agreed to the meeting on the campaign’s behalf, Painter said. When Trump Jr. was offered damaging information about Clinton, Painter said, “the only responsible thing to do was to call the FBI,” but Trump Jr. instead made it clear that “he wanted to collude with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton.”
President Trump, not surprisingly, had a different assessment. After his son made his email exchanges about the meeting public Tuesday morning, the president tweeted, “THERE IS NO COLLUSION!”
Later, however, in a statement through spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump said only that “my son is a high-quality person and I applaud his transparency,” and did not refer to his meeting with the Russian lawyer.
Trump Jr. has said the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, provided no substantive information about Clinton — only statements that “were vague, ambiguous and made no sense,” he told the New York Times. He said that Veselnitskaya’s real purpose to meet was to urge the lifting of U.S. sanctions imposed after the Russian government halted U.S. adoptions of Russian children.
For her part, Veselnitskaya said in a statement that she had not discussed the presidential campaign during the meeting and was not acting on behalf of the Russian government.
But even if Trump’s son and his colleagues learned nothing damaging about Clinton at the meeting, legal analysts said, U.S. law prohibits even attempting to obtain anything of value from a foreign source.
“The fact that he went to the meeting after being informed that the Russian lawyer possessed damaging information about Clinton suggests that he tried to obtain something from someone else. ... That fits within the definition of solicitation,” said Bertrall Ross, an election law professor at UC Berkeley.
Hasen of UC Irvine said federal law broadly defines campaign contributions “of value” that are illegal to solicit from a foreign government or person. He cited Federal Elections Commission opinions concluding that polling information, or campaign flyers and door-hangers with little monetary worth, had “some value” and could not be accepted from a foreign source.
Information that would help the Trump campaign “can be considered a ‘thing of value’ for purposes of the campaign finance law,” Hasen said.
Although the candidate himself was not implicated, it was only six weeks later that Donald Trump publicly called for the Russian government to hack into his rival’s emails and make them public. White House spokesman Sean Spicer later said Trump was “joking” when he said that.
But Robert Bauer, a New York University law professor and former White House counsel under President Barack Obama, saw nothing funny about it. “Mr. Trump and his campaign were open to whatever help the Russians would provide. They made that clear to the Russians,” he said in an online posting.
Trump Jr.’s emails may not be the last word on his Russian get-together, said Michael Salerno, a clinical professor of law at UC Hastings in San Francisco. He noted that the downfall of Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, began when previously undisclosed U.S. government recordings contradicted his public version of his meeting with the Russian ambassador.
“I would be astonished if ... recording doesn’t exist in these meetings” with the Russian lawyer, Salerno said. “There’s good surveillance on the Russians.”