Trump Jr. paints Russian meeting as ‘opposition research,’ but not all buy it
Donald Trump Jr. casts his willingness to hear potential Russian dirt about Hillary Clinton as standard opposition research into a political rival.
But opposition research normally involves slogging through public records, poring over candidate statements and tracking a politician’s every public appearance, hoping to uncover damaging material — not a meeting of high-ranking campaign aides with someone they believed represented a hostile foreign government, several campaign and ethics experts told USA TODAY.
“It’s called spying, not opposition research,” Richard Painter, President George W. Bush’s former ethics lawyer, said of any information gleaned from Russian sources during the 2016 campaign.
“Most people have this sense that American elections should not be influenced by foreign interests,” said Larry Noble, a former top Federal Election Commission lawyer who is now at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.
However, others said it made perfect sense for someone in the Trump campaign to meet with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, described to Trump Jr. by an intermediary as possessing incriminating material on Clinton.
But Jeff Berkowitz, a veteran Republican opposition researcher, said the task should have fallen to a lower-level campaign researcher or paid consultant, rather than the candidate’s son.
The senior Trump defied convention by running his presidential campaign aided by a core group of family members and a few dozen staffers and consultants, compared to the hundreds on Clinton’s campaign workforce. “You didn’t have gatekeepers to handle these things and decide whether it was something useful,” Berkowitz said.
“Everyone in politics would have taken that meeting,” he said, adding “It just should have been someone other than Donald Jr.”
Trump Jr., who now helps oversee his father’s real-estate and branding empire, said the meeting yielded nothing useful about Clinton and focused on a 2012 U.S. law imposing sanctions on Russia. Veselnitskaya denied discussing any compromising material about Clinton or working for Russian authorities.
“It’s called spying, not opposition research.” Richard Painter, former ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush