President Trump has spent the past year and a half emphatically declaring that there was “no collusion” between his campaign and Russia, adamantly and angrily insisting that any suggestion to the contrary is nothing but a “hoax.”
Trump is now trying out a new line, which looks a little something like this: There was “no collusion” … “to the best of my knowledge.”
The Post has a
remarkable piece reporting that Donald Trump Jr.’s presence on the campaign trail is in major demand among GOP candidates. Trump Jr. energizes the Trump base, in spite of the fact — or rather
because of the fact — that he may be in legal jeopardy, as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III scrutinizes Trump Jr.’s role in the Trump Tower meeting and its aftermath. For many Trump voters who have been relentlessly told that Mueller is leading a “deep-state coup” against the president, Trump Jr. represents a galvanizing, heroic figure who is both resisting and getting unfairly persecuted by that coup.
But in the Post piece, the president makes a statement about Trump Jr. that betrays significantly less confidence in his son’s prospects than Trump voters may have. Trump has
privately frettedthat Trump Jr. may have strayed into legal jeopardy with the Trump Tower meeting, which Trump Jr. and other campaign officials took in the expectation of receiving dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government.
...
Recently, Trump
flatly declared on Twitter that his son held that Trump Tower meeting “to get information on an opponent.” This amounts to conceding that his son and top campaign officials had been eager to conspire with a hostile foreign power to sabotage the election on his behalf, and again reveals that the statement he (the president) dictated about the meeting was a big lie.
One big question right now is: Did Trump know about and approve the meeting at the time? He may not have; we’ll find out soon enough. But another question also matters: What happened
after this meeting? As one legal expert
told Natasha Bertrand, the big unknown is whether it bore some kind of relation to Russia’s subsequent cybertheft of Democratic emails and other possible evidence of collusion by Trump advisers like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, making the meeting part of “the same criminal conspiracy.”
In this context, Bauer pointed out, Trump’s claim that nothing untoward happened subsequently “to the best of my knowledge” is revealing.
“He’s trying to put as much of a cloak of ignorance around himself as he possibly can,” Bauer told me. “What this does is abandon Trump’s year-and-a-half explanation that there was absolutely ‘no collusion.’ After that meeting, there could have been ongoing coordination. And now he’s not denying that could have happened. He’s saying he doesn’t know.”
The real nature of the bind Trump is in ...