Today’s quote comes to us from Donald Trump Jr. It is contained in one of the emails he released today, showing (what we are told is) the complete email chain between himself and go-between Ron Goldstone (a family friend whom the Trumps have worked with in the past on entertainment, not political, ventures).
When he was told, via email, that information potentially damaging to Hillary Clinton was “…obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump”, Trump Jr. responded with:
“If it’s what you say, I love it.”
So then-candidate Trump’s son loved the idea of getting damaging information from someone who claimed Russia was supporting his father.
And?
If Chelsea Clinton were offered information from the same source by someone saying it was “…obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Ms. Clinton”, what do you think she would have said? “No thanks, we don’t want damaging information we can use against Donald Trump in the campaign”?
If so, I want a swig and/or puff of what you are smoking and/or drinking.
The first issue here is whether getting such information would have been illegal in any way. And I don’t see how it could have. Governments – very much including ours -provide information/support to candidates we favor in other country’s elections, don’t we?
If you disagree, I suggest you ask Benjamin Netanyahu about the $350,000 of taxpayer dollars President Obama spent in an effort to remove him from office. And then try and find a fraction of the media coverage for that entire story as you will find for this email chain in just the first 24 hours.
The second question is whether it is unethical. That possibility is a lot more credible. Legalities aside, I don’t know whether accepting such information is proper. And I certainly would like to.
But let’s temper even this possibility with the fact that Donald Trump Jr. is not a politician, he does not come from a political family, and it is therefore likely that he may have seen this as nothing beyond being a chance to get dirt on Hillary Clinton. Since nothing appears to have come of it, and there is no indication he did it a second time, what is it, other than an obviously painful learning process?
Now that we have talked about the incident itself (and there may be more here than meets the eye – read this article about “Fusion GSP” and see for yourself)…
…I have a question:
Is this the same kind of coverage we saw last year over Hillary Clinton’s “erased” emails? The emails that she lied about over and over again (first they were just private stuff, then they were government related but nothing classified, then they were government related and classified but not marked as such, then we found out that plenty of them were marked classified as well)?
Another question: is this the same kind of coverage we saw last year over the emails Hillary Clinton claimed to have destroyed? The tens of thousands of them that she didn’t just erase, but “bleached”, and had the hard drives physically destroyed? As Rep. Trey Gowdy so correctly pointed out:
“She and her lawyers had those emails deleted. And they didn’t just push the delete button; they had them deleted where even God can’t read them. They were using something called BleachBit. You don’t use BleachBit for yoga emails or bridemaids emails. When you’re using BleachBit, it is something you really do not want the world to see.”
One last question: how come the same media jumping through hoops on this story, made nothing of the deep ties between Hillary Clinton and Russia – including the exchange of millions of dollars, and the enabling of Russian interests to gain control of 20% of the United States’ uranium assets? Not even the New York Times, which REPORTED it two years ago.
I award Donald Trump Jr. Quote Of The Day “honors” for saying what his counterpart, Chelsea, or anyone else in either campaign, would have said if the same offer were made to them.
And I award media another dishonorable mention – this time for cherry picking this issue while giving Clinton & Co. a pass on the others I have enumerated above.
