Culture

Trump Attorney: Don Jr.’s Meeting With Russians Couldn’t Have Been ‘Nefarious’ If The Secret Service Allowed It

Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Kremlin-linked attorney — who he believed would give him damaging information on Hillary Clinton — continues to grab headlines a week after the story broke. Don Jr. even tried to extinguish the flames by releasing his own emails, which only proved the case against him. That is to say, this was the first publicly admitted instance of a Trump campaign member attempting to collude with Russia, and President Trump’s attorney, Jay Sekulow, attempted to clean up the mess on the Sunday morning talk shows. On ABC’s This Week, Sekulow only made things worse with an attempt to pin any inappropriateness upon the Secret Service:

“If this was nefarious, why’d the Secret Service allow these people in? The president had Secret Service protection at that point. That raised a question with me.”

Sekulow’s suggesting that the Trump Tower meeting was fully vetted by the Secret Service, which is a weak attempt to explain away how Don Jr. accepted the meeting by typing, “If it’s what you say I love it.” Even Fox News anchors like Shepard Smith and Chris Wallace are utterly disgusted because “the deception is mind-boggling,” and Sekulow’s trying to blame the Secret Service. Not that this should be a surprising tactic — President Trump already tried to blame Loretta Lynch for the Russian lawyer’s visa (when Lynch was an attorney general, not a member of the State Department, which issues visas).

Sekulow’s visit with CNN’s Jake Tapper didn’t go much better. In this clip, Tapper calls out Sekulow for trying to shift focus to the Clinton campaign: “I know you want to change the subject, let’s go back to Russia.”

Below, Sekulow battled with Tapper over the anchor’s assertion that the meeting was “wrong” even if it wasn’t illegal. Then came plenty of rhetorical gymnastics by Sekulow, who claimed that an infinite number of meetings happened, all very brief and most unimportant, because that’s just what happens during campaigns. Yet Tapper cut straight to the point: “Not with the governments of hostile foreign powers, Jay. That is not normal.”

Still, Sekulow continued to stress how campaigns “involve opposition research,” and he’s only concerned with the legality of the situation, not whether or not it was wrong. Once again, he tried to talk about Clinton and the Ukraine, but Tapper said to cool it because it’s the Trump campaign that’s being investigated, not Clinton’s: “There isn’t one because nobody from the Ukranian government met with the Clinton campaign.”

(Via ABC News & CNN)