Trump Jr. had already admitted in a statement that he took the meeting with the Russian attorney, a woman named Natalia Veselnitskaya, to get useful information on Hillary Clinton. His defense of his actions was that the meeting didn’t bear fruit: that “it quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.” In other words, there’s no way this constituted meaningful collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia because Veselnitskaya didn’t provide him with anything useful.
But experts on national security and election law say this “defense” is, legally speaking, no defense at all.
“The emails are simply-put damning as a legal matter,” explains Ryan Goodman, a former Defense Department special counsel and current editor of the legal site Just Security. “The text of the emails provide very clear evidence of participation in a scheme to involve the Russian government in federal election interference, in a form that is prohibited by federal criminal law.”
Jens David Ohlin, a law professor at Cornell University, is even blunter: “It’s a shocking admission of a criminal conspiracy.”
Trump Jr.‘s decision to take the meeting in and of itself likely violated campaign finance law, which does not require you to actually get anything useful from foreigners. In other words, the mere fact that Trump Jr. asked for information from a Russian national about Clinton might have constituted a federal crime.
“The law states that no person shall knowingly solicit or accept from a foreign national any contribution to a campaign of an item of value,” Goodman tells me. “There is now a clear case that Donald Trump Jr. has met all the elements of the law, which is a criminally enforced federal statute.”
