The liberal media do not seem to understand that last summer’s meeting between Trump, Jr. and a Russian lawyer — far from being a “smoking gun” — actually demolishes their Trump/Russia collusion narrative.
In the ongoing drama of allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, the “smoking gun” being touted by the liberal mainstream media this week is Donald Trump, Jr.’s meeting with a Russian government lawyer last summer. E-mails released by Trump, Jr. show that he agreed to the meeting to obtain “some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia.” The documents promised to be “very high level and sensitive information” that was being offered to the Trump campaign as part of “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” What CNN, the New York Times, and their ilk do not seem to understand is that the Trump, Jr. meeting — far from being a “smoking gun” — actually knocks the wheels off the cart of the Trump/Russia collusion narrative they have been flogging for months.
Trump, Jr. tweeted images of all the e-mails related to the meeting. Those images were not posted in chronological order. The New York Times — which broke the story on Trump, Jr.’s previously undisclosed meeting — has provided a complete list of the e-mails in text form and in the order in which they were written.
In releasing the e-mails, Trump, Jr. wrote:
To everyone, in order to be totally transparent, I am releasing the entire email chain of my emails with Rob Goldstone about the meeting on June 9, 2016. The first email on June 3, 2016 was from Rob, who was relating a request from Emin, a person I knew from the 2013 Ms. Universe Pageant near Moscow. Emin and his father have a very highly respected company in Moscow. The information they suggested they had about Hillary Clinton I thought was Political Opposition Research. I first wanted to just have a phone call but when that didn’t work out, they said the woman would be in New York and asked if I would meet. I decided to take the meeting. The woman, as she has said publicly, was not a government official. And, as we have said, she had no information to provide and wanted to talk about adoption policy and the Magnitsky Act. To put this in context, this occurred before the current Russian fever was in vogue. As Rob Goldstone said just today in the press, the entire meeting was “the most inane nonsense l ever heard. And I was actually agitated by it.”
The e-mails show that — though the lawyer (Natalia Veselnitskaya) whom Trump, Jr. met with was not actually involved in government service and seems to have set the meeting up under false pretenses to talk to Trump Jr. about laws related to U.S. citizens adopting Russian children — Trump, Jr. believed he was meeting a “Russian government attorney” who was associated with the “Crown prosecutor of Russia.” Expressing his frustration over the “waste of time” meeting, Trump, Jr. called it a “nothing.”
Yes, these e-mails demonstrate that some within the Trump campaign (including Trump, Jr., President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort) believed that Russia — as a foreign power — was supporting the Trump campaign. And yes, they also demonstrate that those men were willing to meet with a Russian government lawyer who they believed was willing and able to provide them with information that would harm Clinton’s chances in the election.
But the e-mails do not show collusion. In fact, they show instead that the Trump campaign did not receive any anti-Clinton intelligence information from the Russian lawyer. This is hugely significant — and this is the thing the folks over at CNN and the Times seem to have missed — since it demolishes the key building block for the false Trump-Putin media narrative.
That building block — that Trump was both a victim of blackmail at the hands of Russian intelligence (by which Trump could be controlled) and the beneficiary of damaging intelligence on Hillary Clinton by Russian intelligence (by which his victory was assured) — was first laid with reports of a spurious “dossier” originally reported by CNN and later published in graphic detail by BuzzFeed.
Once that “dossier” was discredited as the fraud that it obviously was, the liberal mainstream media continued to promote the narrative that the Trump campaign had been in collusion with Russia. The only difference was that the “dossier” wasn’t mentioned anymore: The mainstream media severed the root, but continued to distribute the fruit. Without continuing to refer to the “dossier,” liberal “journalists” kept the narrative alive that Trump is “Putin’s puppet and is both under the control of and beholden to Russia.
The Trump, Jr. e-mails show that narrative is completely bogus. If the Trump campaign had been getting dirt on Clinton directly from the FSB and other Russian intelligence agencies, why did Trump, Jr. bother to meet with the Russian lawyer for what he thought was “opposition research” but actually turned out to be a bait-and-switch meeting? While the answer to that question seems to escape the folks who make their livings promoting the narrative, it is simple logic that if the campaign had a direct line to the dirt on Clinton, it would be pointless to go out of the way to duplicate that information by indirect means.
Trump, Jr.’s transparency in this is in stark contrast to the normal method of operation Americans have come to expect from the D.C. crowd. By releasing the e-mails in toto he has demonstrated another big difference between his father’s campaign and that run by Clinton. It is interesting that the same liberal mainstream media calling this a “smoking gun” never managed to report with any degree of depth on any of the box full of smoking guns showing that Clinton had ties to Russia and is clearly guilty of being an enemy of America. Instead, they ran interference for Clinton by keeping the attention on allegations that Trump was colluding with the Russians.
While Trump, Jr. may have acted foolishly in his attempt to conduct “opposition research” on Clinton, he also probably did not act illegally. And — just to put in the for-what-it’s-worth column — both he and his father (as well as others involved) say that President Trump was not aware of the meeting. Another entry in the for-what-it’s-worth column is that fact that if Trump, Jr. had waited just a little longer, his “nothing” meeting could have been avoided altogether; WikiLeaks later released enough damning information on Clinton — provided not by hackers, but by sources within the DNC — to assure that she could not win.
But since the liberal mainstream media have nothing of any substance to bring, they continue to beat the dead horse of “collusion.” And in their zeal to make much ado about nothing, they don’t even realize they just undermined their own narrative.
Photo of Donald Trump, Jr.: AP Images
