What Donald Trump Jr. dismissed “as a wasted 20 minutes” has led to closed-door Senate testimony, subpoenas from special counsel Robert Mueller, and a never-ending news cycle about collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian agents.
Two years ago, Trump Jr. arranged a meeting at Trump Tower between Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort as well as current White House staffer Jared Kushner to discuss Kremlin dirt on Hillary Clinton. It has fueled collusion conspiracy theories, and it has plagued his father’s administration ever since coming to light.
But if Trump Jr. had any regrets, he doesn’t show it. He won’t say whether he would go back in time and cancel the infamous encounter. “As a business guy,” Trump Jr. tells me during a brief interview at a campaign stop in West Virginia with Republican Senate nominee Patrick Morrisey, “I can’t talk about what I would’ve [done] at the time. I did what I did.”
And in pro-Trump West Virginia, that’s a perfectly acceptable answer. Incumbent Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., mostly shies away from the Russia story. Voters put it out of mind. Morrisey insists he hasn’t been asked a single question about collusion the entire time he’s been on the campaign trail. The whole thing, that candidate says, is just media “nonsense” meant “to bring down a very successful president.”
Russia won’t affect West Virginia, Trump Jr. predicts, because people “don’t care about it at all” and because voters are tired of a dragging investigation by the FBI, a law enforcement agency which Trump described as “probably the most competent” in world history. After thirteen months of investigation, he says the special investigation has generated “nothing other than noise.”
A couple hundred miles east, the special prosecutor isn’t as easily dismissed in Washington, D.C. The Department of Justice has filed criminal charges against five U.S. citizens, 13 Russian citizens, and one Dutch national. But in West Virginia, that investigation might as well be occurring on a different planet.
