We see one truly solid takeaway from the story of the day: Donald Trump Jr. is an idiot.
In the heat of your father’s presidential campaign, a bozo British publicist emails you to set up a sit-down with a “Russian government attorney” promising “documents and information” to “incriminate Hillary” courtesy of the “Crown prosecutor of Russia” as “part of” the Russian government’s “support” for Dad — and you eagerly take the meeting.
“If it’s what you say I love it,” wrote Junior. As if the government of former KGB spymaster Vladimir Putin would do anything so clumsy. (Our former colleague Kyle Smith put it nicely: “Don Jr. is why Nigerian email scammers keep trying their luck.”)
Worse, he dragged brother-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign chief Paul Manafort into the meeting, which proved to be a bid by a Moscow fixer to undo a US law causing trouble for her clients. (Reportedly, Kushner walked out within 10 minutes while Manafort did work on his phone.)
Oh, and someone was so careless with the email trail that it all wound up being fed to the New York Times, for days of headlines that (at best) undermine President Trump’s agenda as both health and tax reform hang in the balance in Congress.
Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. As were Junior’s shifting, incomplete accounts of the meeting under days of Times questioning.
Democrats and the media are frothing to find something criminal in it all, with the most unhinged talking treason. What it clearly was was criminally stupid.