Quack! Quack! by @BloggersRUs

Quack! Quack!

by Tom Sullivan

President Donald Trump personally dictated his eldest son's false statement to the press on the substance of his June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian attorney, the Washington Post reported last night. Jared Kushner's legal team came across the now-infamous Trump Jr. email chain setting up the meeting while responding to an information request from Congress. The lawyers advised transparency. But on the flight home from the G20 meeting, Trump Sr. overruled them according to a Trump advisor and others who requested anonymity:

Flying home from Germany on July 8 aboard Air Force One, Trump personally dictated a statement in which Trump Jr. said that he and the Russian lawyer had “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children” when they met in June 2016, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deliberations. The statement, issued to the New York Times as it prepared an article, emphasized that the subject of the meeting was “not a campaign issue at the time.”

This proved false, as later reporting and a public admission from Trump's son proved. The real purpose of the meeting with Trump Jr. and senior campaign officials was to discuss the exchange of information damaging to the Hillary Clinton campaign as “part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy.”

What does it mean? First, "truthful hyperbole" this is not. Peter Zeidenberg, the deputy special prosecutor who investigated the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity during the George W. Bush administration, told the Post this will simply attract more scrutiny from Special Counsel Robert Mueller:

Prosecutors typically assume that any misleading statement is an effort to throw investigators off the track, Zeidenberg said.

“The thing that really strikes me about this is the stupidity of involving the president,” Zeidenberg said. “They are still treating this like a family-run business and they have a PR problem. . . . What they don’t seem to understand is this is a criminal investigation involving all of them.”

Speaking last night with MSNBC's Joy Reid, former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade agreed:

“It is what prosecutors call a ‘consciousness of guilt effort,'” McQuade explained. “If you are there telling a story that later is proved not true, you know people begin asking what the motives are for that. And one motive might be that you were trying to conceal the truth because you know that you are guilty of a crime.”

So many Trump administration players look like Donald, swim like Donald, and quack like Donald, it will be no surprise if Robert Mueller brings down the whole Trumpish flock of Donalds. And Donald too.