The recent breathless reporting about Donal Trump Jr meeting with a Russian to hear some dirt the Russians had on Hillary, has included flat out statements that the person met with, a female attorney, was an agent of the Kremlin. There is no evidence of that indeed the only evidence is her statement in an interview that she was not. The ruse she reportedly offered to get access to the incoming administration, using something juicy on a topic in the news, has been virtually testified to, soon to be sworn to, as just that as she had no such information. Her purpose for the meeting was to lobby on an international adoption matter.
Should Donald trump Jr have met with a person, Russian or not, on the pretext that they had “opposition research”? In short, with absolutely no deference to Lindsey Graham, who has joined Chuck Schumer and Maxine Waters and Sheila Jackson Lee in many a grandstanding display, is guardedly yes. It was not illegal and folks, that’s politics.
The ethical issue enters into it with what one does with any information obtained. Has it been vetted and the circumstances of the reception of the information revealed so as to be transparent about any quid pro quo? In this case there was no information (and no news) and therefore no quid pro quo. The reason for “the campaign” meeting with such supposed informants is that the dominant opposition liberal media cannot be trusted to tell the whole truth and because political camps want to be prepared and know whether to even refer the more neutral media to the informant and not be embarrassed. Does anyone seriously expect the Democrats would operate any differently?
Look at the substantive information about the Ukrainian government injecting itself on behalf of Hillary Clinton? Where is the mainstream media attention to that, to the Russian connections to Hillary and her many subversions of the truth and political opponents? Does Lindsey Graham carry his soapbox around to expound on such matters, challenging Chuck Schumer’s holier than though shtick? Where is the hounding by the media regarding the Hillary campaign’s many connections to Russia, including quid pro quo matters?
And the Republican Party is hopeless at finding its tongue in defense of Trump and to counter Democrat accusations. It is not hard to do. We are reminded today, in the Dispatch Argus (we doubt someone had any grand plans in slipping this in, more likely it came up in rotation) of considered Russian influence in the 1960 presidential election:
Which reminded us of Ted Kennedy:
Remember when Ted Kennedy asked the Russians to ‘interfere’?
By Daniel John Sobieski writing at The American Thinker (excerpt including picture)
If Sen. Schumer and House Minority Leader Pelosi want to investigate attempts to work with Moscow to influence a U.S. election, they should investigate Sen. Ted Kennedy’s attempt to get the Russians to help him prevent the re-election of President Ronald Reagan in 1984. As Peter Robinson wrote in Forbes in 2009, London Times reporter John Sebastian, poring in 1991 over Soviet archives Boris Yeltsin had made public, found a memorandum detailing another instance of Sen. Ted Kennedy going a bridge too far:
Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy.
“On 9-10 May of this year,” the May 14 memorandum explained, “Sen. Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow.” (Tunney was Kennedy’s law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) “The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov.”
Kennedy’s message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. “The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations,” the memorandum stated. “These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign
. . .
The memorandum, which shows Kennedy’s efforts to derail Reagan’s attempt to build up our nuclear deterrent in Europe, received little or no attention until the publication of Paul Kengor’s book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, in 2006.
Russia worked overtime to portray Reagan as a cowboy, reckless, a hair- triggered warmonger.
Related reading about the 20 minute Trump Jr meeting.
Liberal constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley scoffs at claims Donald Trump Jr guilty of treason.
