What the columnists said

In pleading for transparency, said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com, Rupert Murdoch’s Trump-friendly Wall Street Journal fails to consider that Trump and his inner circle may have lied systematically “because they have something to hide.” What if the truth about these contacts “is really bad?’’ Rather than rely on team Trump’s honesty and good will, Republicans who truly want the truth can take concrete steps to get to the bottom of this scandal: House Republicans, for starters, could end their blockade of Democratic efforts to compel the release of Trump’s tax returns.

“The latest nothingburger ablaze on the media grill is that Donald Jr. may have committed treason,” said Stephen Presser in The Washington Times. That “betrays an astonishing lack of understanding of the term.” To meet the constitutional definition of treason, Don Jr. would have to have given “aid and comfort” to an enemy. But the sole reason he held the meeting was to expose possible Clinton wrongdoing. “There is not the slightest suggestion that he was an enemy of his country, or a friend to its enemies.”

Trump’s admiration for Putin calls into question his “motives, judgment, and loyalty,” said Jennifer Rubin in WashingtonPost .com. Our president rushed to the side of America’s greatest foe at the dinner table not to bolster our nation’s position in the world, but because he loves world leaders who flatter his ego and tell him what he wants to hear, such as Putin’s denial he meddled in the election. That is why it was so dangerous for him to be alone with his wily and manipulative Russian counterpart. Trump is “the dream pawn for foreign espionage operations, not only a ‘useful idiot’ but a desperate one.”