Last weekend, as Air Force One delivered Donald Trump home from his meetings with Vladimir Putin and other world leaders, the president's advisers huddled, drafting a statement to give to The New York Times. The paper was about to publish a story revealing a pre-election meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Kremlin-connected lawyer.
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The quote attributed to the First Son—that he primarily discussed American restrictions on Russian adoptions—remained operative for less than 24 hours, until the Times reported that Don Jr.'s larger motivation was collecting dirt on Hillary Clinton.
President Trump reportedly approved the first statement given to the Times, meaning that he was either badly informed or that he endorsed a wildly misleading reply that hung Don Jr. out to dry. Lying to the media is, sadly, not a crime.
And the president's greatest vulnerability currently appears to be an obstruction-of-justice charge related to his firing of F.B.I. director James Comey. But the Don Jr. episode still compounds his father's legal difficulties—by further eroding Trump's credibility, and by giving special counsel Robert Mueller and the F.B.I. more ways to trip up witnesses under questioning.
“If you don't tell the truth to the F.B.I., you don't need to be under oath to be charged with a felony—making false statements,” says a defense lawyer who has handled some of Washington's highest-profile cases. “That's where they get leverage.” For an administration with an elastic sense of facts, multiplying the stories that need to be kept straight is unhelpful.
“It's going to be very hard to prove conspiracy,” says Bob Bennett, a top Washington white-collar lawyer who represented President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky investigation. “But it could be easier to prove false statements, and that's the government's favorite charge. I don't see a criminal case yet. But Trump and his people are certainly making an effort to show that there is one.”
In this context, Don Jr.'s release of his e-mails agreeing to the meeting could prove a serious blunder. “I don't see what benefit you get out of releasing something like those e-mails,” Bennett says. “A scandal needs oxygen.”