In the great Aaron Sorkin and Rob Reiner film "A Few Good Men," Jack Nicholson's character, Col. Nathan R. Jessup famously snaps under questioning and blurts the truth in court about who ordered a violent and ultimately deadly assault against another Marine. Spoiler: it turns out Col. Jessup incriminates himself by confessing to the “code red” -- the legendary “you can't handle the truth!” scene.
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It's difficult to know exactly why Donald Trump pulled Jessup on Twitter this past weekend, but he did. We can assume it was fear and desperation mixed with a bit of hubris and a lot of rage, said and boiled into an erratic cocktail of madness. And if he's satisfied with his confession, he's more insane than we all thought because he didn't confess to his own crime. Instead, Trump committed a form of murder, incriminating his first-born son, Donald Trump Jr., as well as his son-in-law, Jared Kushner - along with his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who's already neck-deep in legal jeopardy.
It's all right there. “This was a meeting to get information on an opponent.” We'll circle back to whether that's illegal presently.
You might recall that a little more than a year ago, when the news of the June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower first broke, President Trump for some reason dictated a statement on his son's behalf saying that the meeting was strictly about Russian adoptions . What Trump didn't say at the time was that Russia was restricting adoptions to American couples due to the existence of the Magnitsky Act and the sanctions linked to it. The lifting of the sanctions (it seemed) would be Trump's “fee,” paid to Russia in exchange for the dirt the Russians were offering to Don Jr., Kushner and Manafort.
In addition, the president's misleading 2017 statement (written for his son) emerged after Don Jr. publicly posted his 2016 email exchange with publicist Rob Goldstone, in which it was clear the meeting had to do with receiving dirt on Clinton that had been gathered by Russian intelligence. The emails also confirmed that, according to Goldstone, Russia wanted Trump to win, a preference personally confirmed by Vladimir Putin in Helsinki last month.