Donald Trump Jrs stunningly incriminating statement to the New York Times

Donald Trump Jr. has made a potentially damaging New York Times report much, much worse.   
The Times on Sunday reported that the president’s eldest son was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in New York on June 9, 2016.   

As Times reporters Jo Becker, Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman explained, Trump Jr.’s motivation for agreeing to the meeting “points to the central question in federal investigations of the Kremlin’s meddling in the presidential election: Whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians.   
The accounts of the meeting represent the first public indication that at least some in the campaign were willing to accept Russian help.”   

Paul Manafort, the campaign’s chairman at the time, and Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, also attended.   

The report looks bad for the president, even though his private legal team told the Times that Trump did not participate or even know about the meeting. Trump has a go-to playbook in situations like these: cast doubt on the credibility of unnamed sources (five, in this case) and cry, “Fake news!”   
But Trump Jr. took that strategy off the table with a stunningly incriminating first response.   

The rest of Trump Jr.’s statement is an attempt to minimize the value of what the lawyer actually told him. The outcome of the meeting is beside the point.   

Trump Jr.’s attempt to obtain information from a Russian lawyer that could harm Clinton seems likely to alarm investigators, regardless of whether the effort proved successful.  

By Callum Borchers   
(c) 2017, The Washington Post · Jul 10, 2017