Donald Trump Jr. arrives before the start of the second day of the Republican National Convention on July 19, 2016 at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio.
Jim Watson | AFP | Getty Images
Donald Trump Jr. arrives before the start of the second day of the Republican National Convention on July 19, 2016 at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio.
Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer in June 2016 with the express purpose of getting information the Russian government had acquired on Hillary Clinton, according to a New York Times report published on Monday night. If this account is true, experts on national security and election law say, then there is a very real chance that President Donald Trump's son committed a federal crime.
Trump had already admitted in a statement that he took the meeting with the attorney, named Natalia Veselnitskaya, to get useful information on Hillary Clinton. His defense of his actions was that the meeting didn't bear fruit: that "it quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information." In other words, there's no way this constituted meaningful collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia because Veselnitskaya didn't provide him with anything useful.
But experts on national security and election law say there's a good case that this "defense" is, legally speaking, no defense at all — especially in light of the Times report.