In what has become a time-honored tradition, Donald Trump took to Twitter early Sunday Morning, and when the dust settled, the President admitted that there was collusion with a foreign power in the 2016 election.
“Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower. This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics – and it went nowhere. I did not know about it,” said Trump on Twitter.
The President seemed to be reacting to a report by Philip Rucker in the Independent, which said the president was “anxious” and “brooding” over recent news about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, worried about his son, Donald J. Trump Jr. thanks to his involvement in same.
In saying that he isn’t concerned, Trump has nevertheless torpedoed his past defense of the meeting in claiming it was indeed about getting dirt on his presidential campaign opponent, Hilary Clinton.
The president and others have previous claimed that the meeting was about “adoptions,” which tie it into the Magnitsky Act, a bill intended to punish Russian officials over the death of Russian tax accountant Sergei Magnitsky in a Moscow prison. Vladimir Putin limited the adoption of Russian children to people abroad as part of his response to the Magnitsky Act.
A statement released in July 2017 reportedly penned by Donald Trump Jr. was later revealed to have been dictated by his father, leading to further investigation of the meeting, and opening up further questions in impropriety on behalf of the Trump campaign and Donald Trump himself.
“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, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow-up,” read part of the July 2017 statement
Trumps Attorney Jay Sekulow, tried to soften his own part of the cover-up, saying on ABC’s “This Week” that, “I had bad information in that statement.” While Sekulow had originally claimed that the President has no hand in the Trump Tower meeting, it was later revealed that Trump himself dictated the statement.
The declaration that the meeting was indeed to get information on Clinton does open the door to this meeting being an attempt by Russia to influence the outcome of the election, and in spite of Trump’s claim that it was legal, still opens the possibility of crimes having been committed.
Trump, of course, claims to not knowing about the meeting, in spite of his involvement in the statement mentioned above.
Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license