Trump Jr. dubs the Russian meeting ‘opposition research’
Experts disagree over the characterization, raise issues of legality
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 and a frequent critic of President Trump’s activities, said of any information gleaned from Russian sources during the 2016 campaign.
“I don’t know many people who would have done this,” said Larry Noble, a former top Federal Election Commission lawyer who is now at the non-partisan Campaign Legal Center. “Most people have this sense that American elections should not be influenced by foreign interests.”
However, others in the noholds-barred world of political intelligence said it made perfect sense for someone in the Trump campaign to meet with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, described to the younger Trump by an intermediary as possessing incriminating material about Clinton.
But Jeff Berkowitz, a veteran Republican opposition research- er, said the task instead should have fallen to a lower-level campaign researcher or paid consultant, rather than the candidate’s son. Berkowitz, a former White House official who worked as research director for the Republican National Committee and Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign, said the revelations about the younger Trump’s meeting with the Russian also serve to underscore the bare-bones nature of his father’s unorthodox political operation.
The senior Trump, a novice to politics, defied convention by running his 2016 presidential campaign aided by a core group of family members and a few doz- en 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 of advance vetting of the Veselnitskaya meeting.
“Everyone in politics would have taken that meeting. This is the nature of politics,” he said. But, he added: “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.
Trump Jr. now faces questions about whether he broke federal law with the meeting.