The latest Russia frenzy is over Michael Cohen’s alleged allegation that Don Jr. told his father about the Trump Tower meeting with the Russians. Trump and his allies deny it. Both Cohen and Trump are, ahem, unreliable witnesses. But given the history of denials that have been rendered inoperative — e.g., that Trump didn’t know about the pay-offs of women — and the attempt to obfuscate the nature of the Trump Tower meeting, you have at least to be skeptical about the Trump team’s version.
Maybe it’s correct and I certainly hope so. (I’ve been surprised before — I doubted, for instance, that Comey had really told Trump he wasn’t under investigation, as Trump said in his letter firing him). But if Trump and Co. are not telling the truth, it’s phenomenally stupid — not to mention wrong — given the facts as we know them. All indications are that the Russian meeting was a nothing burger. If it emerged that Trump knew about it, it would be embarrassing and drive a few news cycles, but not change the basic trajectory of anything.
But this is why people often get in trouble in these sort of investigations. It’s usually inconvenient to tell the full truth at any given moment or you get dug into a story that’s false, and then you make yourself vulnerable to perjury charges. Indeed, besides the exemplary indictments of Russians who will never see the inside of a U.S. court room and Paul Manafort’s prosecution over shady lobbying, this case so far is about perjury.
As for how Trump Tower affects the question of collusion, it obviously speaks of a willingness to accept dirt on Hillary from Russians. This is blameworthy. Taking the meeting was amateurish and wrong. Even if you want to hear about whatever these people had to tell you, the normal course of business would be farm out an initial meeting to a lawyer affiliated with the campaign. And it obviously would be best to refuse any information coming from foreign sources, especially from a foreign adversary.
But, again, as far as we know, nothing came of this meeting, and there’s no indication that the Trump campaign was in on the Russian hacking. So we still don’t have evidence of criminal conspiracy with the Russians, which is the white wale of this investigation.
I’ll make me usual disclaimer that there may be information that we don’t know about that will change my view, but for now I agree with what Reihan occasionally says on The Editors podcast. The collusion, such as it was, was out in the open: the Trump campaign broadly knew that the Russians were trying to help them, and didn’t call out or denounce this effort, in keeping with Trump’s policy of never making a concession or upholding a standard against interest. This is a cynical kind of politics, but it’s not the crime of the century, and it didn’t sway the 2016 election.