Even before the latest New York Times report, Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, seemed to be in big trouble. President George W. Bush’s White House ethics lawyer, Richard Painter, had argued on MSNBC that Trump Jr.’s decision to meet with a Kremlin-linked lawyer to get dirt on Hillary Clinton, as reported by the New York Times, “borders on treason if it is not itself treason.”
“Borders on treason”: George W. Bush’s former ethics lawyer blasts Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting
What Trump Jr. should have done, the former Bush administration member said: “call the FBI.”
Things got even worse on Monday night. In another bombshell report, the Times reported that “Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy.”
Now, listen to what Painter said before we knew of this:
“Let’s cut through the baloney here. We know what the Russians have been doing,” Painter said, going through some of the history behind Russia’s conflict with the West and the United States. “When the Russians call or someone calls on behalf of the Russians and offers derogatory information about a former secretary of state who is a presidential candidate, the first person you call is the FBI.”
He added, “I don’t care if you’re Republican, as I am, or a Democrat. You call the FBI. The last thing you do is go meet with the Russians to try and get the derogatory information. They’re only trying do that in order to use you to accomplish some purpose. And we know what that is — it is undermining our system of representative democracy.”
Again, Painter said this before the latest New York Times report, when it was unclear if Trump Jr. actually knew that the person he was meeting was a Russian agent working on behalf of the Russian government to influence the 2016 election. That was already enough for a former White House ethics lawyer — and a Republican — to say that what Trump Jr. did bordered on treason, and that he should have called the FBI.
The Times report now suggests that Trump Jr. knew what was going on — and went ahead and took part in it anyway. As far as we know, he did not call the FBI.
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