Trump’s Lawyers Hid Junior’s Email From Him For THREE WEEKS (TWEET)


For most of this week, political junkies have been trying to sift through the strongest evidence yet that the Donald Trump campaign colluded with Russian interests during the 2016 campaign. It turns out that in June 2016, Donald Trump Jr. got wind that the Kremlin was willing to deliver compromising information about Hillary Clinton. He arranged a meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer to get the promised goods–only to find out she didn’t deliver as promised. In the process, we learned for the first time that high-ranking members of the Trump campaign were at least willing to solicit help from a hostile foreign power.


Well, just before the close of business on Friday, this story took another twist. It turns out that Trump’s legal team knew about this bombshell for three weeks, and yet didn’t tell Trump about it.

Trump maintains that he only learned about Donald Jr.’s meeting earlier this week. However, Yahoo News’ Michael Isikoff learned that principal outside lawyer Marc Kasowitz and Trump Organization chief legal officer Alan Garten first learned about the email exchange that led to the meeting when lawyers for one of the attendees, Trump son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, first discovered them in mid-June. However, it doesn’t appear that they told Trump about this discovery.

As we now know, this email exchange prompted Kushner to update the disclosure form he needed for his security clearance. The New York Times got wind of this update on Saturday, starting the chain of events that ultimately led to the discovery that Donald Jr., Kushner, and campaign chairman Paul Manafort met at Trump Tower with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in hope of getting Kremlin-flavored opposition research about Hillary.


Richard Painter, the former chief ethics counsel for George W. Bush, believes that Kasowitz and Garten’s failure to notify Trump about the emails was unprofessional at best. He told Isikoff that it was “weird” and “unbelievable” that any lawyer would not tell his client about “information that he needs to make informed decisions.” Painter thinks Kasowitz and Garten’s decision to sit on this discovery is particularly hard to understand considering they represent a man who “feels the need to comment on every last thing in the world.”

This revelation adds a raft of questions to the growing pile of questions about the White House’s initial statements about the meeting.

However, if Trump is thinking of blaming this contretemps on nonfeasance by his legal team, that won’t go anywhere. For one thing, even if his lawyers didn’t tell him about the meeting, there was one other person who should have told him about it, and didn’t–Manafort.

Remember how Paul Ryan and others have characterized this meeting as an honest mistake by political novices? Well, Manafort has been in politics for the better part of four decades. He was the one person in that room who knew or should have known this meeting was inappropriate at best and illegal at worst. And yet, he didn’t speak up at the time.


One thing is beyond doubt. A lot of people have a lot of explaining to do about this–and preferably, under oath.

(featured image courtesy Max Goldberg, available under a Creative Commons-BY license)

Darrell is a 30-something graduate of the University of North Carolina who considers himself a journalist of the old school. An attempt to turn him into a member of the religious right in college only succeeded in turning him into the religious right's worst nightmare--a charismatic Christian who is an unapologetic liberal. His desire to stand up for those who have been scared into silence only increased when he survived an abusive three-year marriage. You may know him on Daily Kos as Christian Dem in NC. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook. Click here to buy Darrell a Mello Yello.