Will Don Jr. Be Left Holding the Bag?

The tweet was an “admission that the Trump team had not been forthright,” judged the New York Times, “when Donald Trump Jr. issued a statement in July 2017.” By that the Times meant Don Jr.’s initial response to questions about his June 9, 2016, meeting with a Russian lawyer in Trump Tower, a response that failed to mention his hope to acquire opposition research on Hillary Clinton from the meeting.

The Times described the president’s new tweet as “the starkest acknowledgment yet that a statement he dictated last year about the encounter was misleading.” The Washington Post’s take was similar: “Sunday’s tweet appears to acknowledge more explicitly than before that the meeting was indeed predicated on opposition research.”

Is that true? Let’s go back to July 17, 2017—a little over a week after the story broke that Don Jr., having been promised dirt on Hillary, met with a Kremlin-connected attorney. That morning, President Trump tweeted: “Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That’s politics!” Which seems like a pretty explicit acknowledgment that Don Jr. was there for oppo. But putting aside the question of whether this week’s tweet was more stark and explicit, what is remarkable is that there are still questions to be answered about the 2016 meeting at Trump Tower given how thoroughly it has been scrutinized and documented, primarily by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Let’s go over what we know.

We know the idea for the meeting was floated to Donald Trump Jr. by music promoter Rob Goldstone, the manager for a Russian pop singer, Emin Agalarov. We know that the idea for the meeting was suggested by Emin’s plutocrat father, Araz Agalarov, whose businesses include the event-production company that put on the 2013 Miss Universe pageant (then owned in part by Donald Trump) in Moscow. Araz had met “a well-connected Russian attorney” who “told him that they had some interesting information that could potentially be damaging regarding funding by Russians to the Democrats and to its candidate, Hillary Clinton.” Emin relayed this to Goldstone, telling him the information “could be of interest to the Trumps.”

It was clearly of interest to Don Jr. Goldstone thought it would be easier to reach the son than the candidate himself. “I would run this past [Donald Jr.] first,” the publicist later recounted, because he “was the lesser level.”

We know precisely when Goldstone made his pitch—in an email at 10:36 a.m. on Friday, June 3, 2016. We know that Don Jr. responded positively to the proposal 17 minutes later.

We know what Goldstone proposed to spur Don Jr.’s enthusiasm: “The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with [Emin’s] father Araz this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.”

We know how Don Jr. responded: “if it is what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” By Monday and Tuesday, Trump Jr. and Goldstone were exchanging emails arranging the meeting for Thursday afternoon, June 9, with the lawyer whom Goldstone described as a “Russian government attorney.”

We know a lot about the Russian lawyer, too. Natalia Vladimirovna Veselnitskaya had lunch beforehand with the translator she would use that afternoon, Anatoli Samochornov, and with Ike Kaveladze, who worked for Araz Agalarov. Eventually joining the party was Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, who like Veselnitskaya had been working with Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS to push for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act, under which 18 Russian officials had been placed under U.S. sanctions in early 2013.

Veselnitskaya reportedly asked Akhmetshin, “What do you think I should tell this Trump’s son?” He gave her advice on how to talk to busy Americans: “I told her like how to present and how not to,” Akhmetshin later testified. “I actually cautioned her, you know, the Russians are—they kind of attack you first thing, there’s no like small talk, so I told her, ‘Don’t do that.’ ” Other suggestions: Don’t “speak too long, because she kind of tends to speak long. I said like keep your sentences short and kind of don’t waste people’s time.”

She apparently didn’t follow his advice.

Veselnitskaya opened the meeting with a broad assertion that Russians were pouring money into the DNC, but she didn’t back up her allegations with anything specific. “Her statements were vague, ambiguous, and made no sense,” Don Jr. would later state. “No details or supporting information was provided or even offered.” And before he knew it, Veselnitskaya had rambled off into talking about the adoption of Russian children, which had been forbidden to Americans by the Russian government in retaliation for the Magnitsky Act. “It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting.”

That’s when Jared Kushner, who was running late, arrived. “When I got there,” Donald Trump’s son-in-law stated to Senate investigators, a woman, with the aid of a translator, was “talking about the issue of a ban on U.S. adoptions of Russian children.” This was not what he expected. “I actually emailed an assistant from the meeting after I had been there for 10 or so minutes,” Kushner recounted. What did the email say? “Can u pls call me on my cell? Need excuse to get out of meeting.”

Paul Manafort didn’t leave the meeting. The campaign chairman at the time, he took some perfunctory notes and dozed off.

Goldstone, the music promoter, was mortified at how the meeting had gone: “On the way out, Don Jr. kind of thanked me. And I said to him, I’m sorry. I’m really embarrassed by this meeting. I don’t know what that was about.” More than two years later people are still asking what it was about.

There are two controversies ­intertwined. The first is the fact of the meeting itself; the second is how the Trumps responded once knowledge of it became public.

It was a year later that reporters started asking questions. The White House legal and communications teams recommended full disclosure and transparency. Flying back from Europe, the president took a different tack. On July 8, 2017, he crafted a brief—dishonest—response to be put out under Don Jr.’s name. The dishonesty was not in what was said but in what was omitted. The statement President Trump dictated for his son read, “We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government.” True enough. What he left out was that Don Jr. had taken the meeting because he had been promised proof of Clinton criminality from a Russian source.

The we-were-just-talking-adoption line lasted all of one day. The next day, a new, more complete statement was issued: “After pleasantries were exchanged, the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton,” Trump Jr.’s new account read.

Donald Trump Jr. has stuck to that second statement ever since, including when he was interviewed by Senate investigators. Along the way some self-serving filigree was added to make it all appear less crass: “To the extent that they had information concerning the fitness, character, or qualifications of any presidential candidate, I believed that I should at least hear them out,” he told the Judiciary Committee last September. “Depending on what, if any, information that they had, I could then consult with counsel to make an informed decision as to whether to give it any further consideration.” It almost sounds like a public service.

But why, if the story has remained the same for a year, is there such breathless reporting on the president’s tweets? Perhaps because special counsel Robert Mueller’s office is investigating whether false or misleading statements by the president amount to obstruction of justice.

It’s the position of the president’s lawyers that, when it comes to the question of Don Jr.’s ill-advised meeting, Trump Sr. has told the truth. On January 29, 2018, they responded to queries from the special counsel about “Alleged Obstruction of Justice.” The last item dealt with Trump’s botched effort at damage control in the initial response to questions about the meeting. The lawyers stated, “the President dictated a short but accurate response to the New York Times article on behalf of his son, Donald Trump, Jr.”

But that short statement brought to light another layer of dishonesty. Built into the lawyers’ response was the admission that the president had “dictated” the original statement. The president’s spokesmen and lawyers had long been insisting, falsely, that he’d had no hand in it.

Aside from obvious questions of character, is a president legally obliged to tell the truth to the New York Times?

Unsurprisingly, the Times, in a June 2 explainer, argued that he is: A “Watergate-era precedent exists for Congress to consider lies to the public to be obstruction of justice in the looser context of impeachment proceedings. An article of impeachment that lawmakers approved against Nixon before he resigned included ‘making or causing to be made false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States into believing’ there had been no misconduct.”

The Times’s proposed impeachment trigger may be silly and self-aggrandizing, but there’s no doubt that by making assertions in the glib, unlawyerly (and sometimes truth-optional) context of Twitter, the president puts himself and his family at legal risk. Take another of his recent tweets, the July 31 declaration, “Collusion is not a crime.” A fair reporter would be sure to note that the tweet goes on with the caveat, “but that doesn’t matter because there was No Collusion (except by Crooked Hillary and the Democrats)!” Even so, the attention-getting assertion is that collusion is not prohibited by law—attention-getting because it suggests the president is preparing to abandon his caveat and admit some sort of collusion. And what if he did?

While it may prove to be true that there is nothing criminal about “colluding” with foreigners, a suggestion by the president or his advisers of some sort of collusion in Trump Tower could put Don Jr. legally sideways. That’s because Trump Jr., in his interview with the Senate Judiciary Committee, declared: “I did not collude with any foreign government and do not know of anyone who did.”

Don Jr. cannot now claim to have engaged in some sort of everybody-does-it noncriminal “collusion” without running afoul of 18 USC Section 1001, which, as Trump Jr. was warned, “makes it a crime to make any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statements or representations in the course of a congressional investigation.”

Similarly, President Trump has clung to his assertion that when it came to the Trump Tower meeting, “I did not know about it!” That is a snug fit with what Don Jr. said when asked by Senate investigators, “Did you inform your father about the meeting or the underlying offer prior to the meeting?” Trump Jr.’s response left no wiggle room: “No, I did not.” If Trump Sr. abandons his assertion he was out of the loop, Don Jr. is the one left holding the bag.

If the Trump team had been fully truthful from the start about Don Jr.’s meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya, President Trump would have made it harder for the special counsel—let alone the New York Times—to try to cut his tenure short.