During the Watergate hearings, Sen. Howard Baker (R-TN), asked the question that acquired iconic status: "When did [Nixon] know?" When did President Richard Nixon learn about the cover-up activities evolving from the break-in at the Watergate Complex housing Democratic Party headquarters? The same question is being asked in regard to when Donald Trump learned of the meeting of three of his election campaign officials with a Russian lawyer who had been identified in an email as being an emissary from the Russian government.
Donald Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., received an email on June 3, 2016 from Rod Goldstone, a man he met at the 1993 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. The email read that a lawyer connected to the Russian government had negative information -- or "dirt" -- about his election opponent, Hillary Clinton. Donald Jr. emailed back that if the information was as advertised, he would "love it."
The meeting itself took place in Trump Tower, on the floor below Donald Trump's office. It was the time between when the initial email was received and the meeting was held that Donald Trump announced a press conference at which he would present some derogatory information about Clinton. It was shortly after the meeting with the Russian lawyer that Donald Trump made a televised appeal for the Russian government to find Clinton's "missing" 33,000 emails and make them available to the media. The timing of these events makes it likely that Donald Trump knew about the meeting and has lied about it time-after-time since then. A sanctimonious Donald Jr. had the gall to accuse the Democrats of lying about collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.
President Trump has called his son, Donald Jr., a "high-quality" individual and praised him for his "transparency." Donald Jr. has kept silence about the meeting until the New York Times broke the story of it this past weekend. He has given more than one version of what happened at the meeting. President Trump's "transparency" claim is based on his son releasing a chain of emails; however, the New York Times informed Donald Jr. that the emails were ready for publication but gave him time to release them himself. Donald Jr. released the chain of emails minutes before the Times published them.
Donald Jr. went to Sean Hannity, whose mission in life seems to be to explain away Trump family troubles. He told Hannity's viewers that he was just conducting opposition research and when he found that there was nothing there, he felt that there was no need to report the meeting to lawful authority. When Donald Jr. wrote in an email reply that if the information on Hillary Clinton was as good as promised, he would "love it," he established a collusion linkage that can't be explained away. Getting money or anything of value from a foreign entity to influence a U.S. election is unlawful. A veteran prosecutor told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow that opposition research could reasonably be considered to be a thing of value. This prosecutor indicated that other violations of law may be involved, as, for example, obstruction of justice could be involved if there is any attempt to stop an investigation of the three campaign officials who attended the meeting.
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