The NY Times breathlessly reported yesterday that Donald Trump, Jr. and others involved in the Trump campaign met with a Russian lawyer who got the meeting by claiming she had damaging information on Hillary Clinton. So the Trump people did what any campaign would do when promised damaging oppo research – they took the meeting.
Does anyone in their right mind think the Clinton campaign (and the media) would not have taken the meeting with such a tease of information? There is no indication that the promised information related to hacking or anything illegal. The media has been pushing the mostly (if not entirely) bogus “Dossier” on Trump, which reportedly was based on Russian sources, so the feigned outrage is hardly credible.
It turned out the Russian lawyer had no oppo research, and wanted to lobby against a law the Russians don’t like, and as to which the Russians had retaliated by halting adoptions of Russian children by Americans. So the meeting ended shortly after it began.
Michael Walsh in The NY Post writes, The Times ‘exposé’ on Donald Trump Jr. is a big yawn:
No campaign in its right mind would turn down an offer of information on their opponent. That is what opposition research is all about. You can bet Hillary wouldn’t have hung up on the person who claimed to have dirt on the Donald. After all, the Clinton campaign lobbied the comedian Tom Arnold two days before the election to release potentially embarrassing footage from Trump’s TV show, “The Apprentice.” Arnold declined.But in the end, the lawyer had nothing, gave nothing, got nothing in return, in a meeting that lasted 20 minutes. This is a scandal?Having established the smear of “collusion,” the Times must now link every story with the word “Russia” to it in the hopes that the rubes and suckers won’t stop believing that Trump somehow cheated his way into the White House.
I had a sense that this story would not have legs when it was reported on Sunday Nightly News on NBC. They didn’t push the story as aggressively as I thought they would, and actually played it down the middle, providing the explanation offered by Trump Jr. and others.
But that NY Times “bombshell” has been drowned out by a potentially bigger bombshell — James Comey’s memos about conversations with Trump contained classified information and are viewed by the FBI as government property. That would contradict Comey’s sworn Senate testimony, and raises the possibility that the memo Comey leaked to a friend for a NY Times story contained classified information.
The Hill reported:
More than half of the memos former FBI chief James Comey wrote as personal recollections of his conversations with President Trump about the Russia investigation have been determined to contain classified information, according to interviews with officials familiar with the documents.This revelation raises the possibility that Comey broke his own agency’s rules and ignored the same security protocol that he publicly criticized Hillary Clinton for in the waning days of the 2016 presidential election.Comey testified last month he considered the memos to be personal documents and that he shared at least one of them with a Columbia University lawyer friend. He asked that lawyer to leak information from one memo to the news media in hopes of increasing pressure to get a special prosecutor named in the Russia case after Comey was fired as FBI director.
Trump has jumped on the reports, going one step further and accusing Comey of leaking classified information:
So now the topic of conversation is whether Comey leaked classified information and testified falsely, even if he didn’t leak the information.
It’s almost as if the media’s fervor to get Trump on Russian “collusion” always seems to backfire.
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