BREAKING: ‘Alternative Facts’ About Russian ‘Adoption Meeting’ Came From The Donald Himself (TWEETS)



For the better part of the last year-plus, Donald Trump’s response to any talk that he and his campaign colluded with Russia has been some variation of “(noun) (verb) FAKE NEWS!” But it may have gotten a lot harder for Trump to keep his head in the sand over this issue. Late Monday night, The Washington Post reported that Donald Trump Jr.’s initial misleading statement about his meeting with a Russian lawyer had been drafted by none other than the president.

According to a number of White House advisers, the issue fell into Trump’s lap at the G-20 Summit, when lawyers for First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner discovered that Donald Jr. had arranged the meeting. Kushner and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort were also on hand. Initially, Kushner and his legal team, as well as White House strategic communications chief Hope Hicks and White House spokesman Josh Raffel, advocated having Donald Jr. release a statement giving a full account of the meeting, in hopes of getting in front of a story that was almost certain to come out in any event.

The details were still being hashed out as the American G-20 delegation boarded Air Force One for the trip home. But Trump grabbed the plan and wadded it up. Instead, Trump himself dictated a statement claiming that Trump met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in order to discuss “a program about the adoption of Russian children.” It also dismissed the meeting as “unimportant.” He drafted the statement himself, then dictated it to Hicks while she was on the phone with Donald Jr.

As we now know, that statement was false. Within 24 hours of that statement being issued to The New York Times–and roughly eight hours after the White House insisted the meeting was a “nothing burger”–we learned that Donald Jr. was actually chomping at the bit to get Kremlin-flavored dirt on Hillary Clinton. Within 48 hours of that statement, Donald Jr. got wind that The Times was about to reveal that he had jumped at a Russian offer for Kremlin-flavored “opposition research” (read: espionage) about Hillary. This all but forced him to release an email exchange that confirmed his enthusiastic response to that offer.


Trump’s decision to jump into this affair had several of his advisers shaking their heads. Several members of both Donald Sr. and Kushner’s legal teams were confused and frustrated at the president’s involvement in the matter.

In a colossal understatement, one adviser told The Post that Trump’s involvement was “unnecessary,” since it carried the appearance that Trump was “the one who attempted to mislead” and didn’t want the truth to come out. This adviser, as well as his colleagues, feared that Trump exposed himself to accusations of a cover-up. They also fear a number of people close to Trump could be in legal jeopardy as well.

The response from Trump’s legal team was predictable. One lawyer, Jay Sekulow, dismissed The Post’s story as “misinformed, inaccurate, and not pertinent.” With apologies to Shepard Smith, if that’s the case, Jay, then why did we get “lie after lie after lie” from the Trump camp about this affair?

One person who wants to know the answer to that question is Peter Zeidenberg, the deputy special prosecutor who investigated the blowing of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. He believes that special counsel Robert Mueller should be very interested in Trump’s role in the drafting of that statement. He was dumbfounded at the “stupidity” of Trump being within an area code of this affair, and believed the Trumps either don’t know or don’t understand that “this is a criminal investigation involving all of them.”


At least one lawmaker has already concluded this is a lot more than stupidity–Congressman Ted Lieu of California.

Lieu’s not the only one. If it looks like a cover-up and smells like a cover-up, it’s a cover-up. And it looks like this cover-up definitely has Trump’s tiny fingerprints on it.

(featured image courtesy Gage Skidmore, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA 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.