Donald Trump Jr. has defended his meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer by saying he didn’t get anything out of it, but Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer isn’t buying it.
MoreDonald Trump Jr. has defended his meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer by saying he didn’t get anything out of it, but Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer isn’t buying it.
“It’s a hell of a defense to say your collusion might be incompetent,” he told Fox News’ Martha MacCallum.
“If you get a call to go to a certain place in the middle of the night to pick up stolen goods and it turns out the stolen goods don’t show up but the cops show up,” he added, “I think you’re going to have a very weak story saying, ‘Well, I got swindled here.’”
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Trump, the eldest son of President Donald Trump, admitted on Tuesday that he met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya on the pretense he’d be receiving damning information about Hillary Clinton, his father’s presidential election opponent. Rob Goldstone, a music publicist who set up the meeting, told Trump Jr. in an email that the meeting was part of Russia’s attempts to help his father win the election.
“I love it,” Trump Jr. told Goldstone in emails he posted to Twitter late Tuesday morning. He later told Fox News host Sean Hannity that the meeting was “such a nothing” because Veselnitskaya didn’t end up disclosing anything useful.
Others in the Trump inner circle have used the same defense.
“It was a nothing meeting,” the president’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, said on Sunday.
Trump Jr. also defended the meeting as typical “opposition research.” But Krauthammer, who has in the past dismissed claims the Trumps colluded with Russia, called that excuse “weak.”
“This is not just opposition,” he said. “This is not someone coming out of the woodwork in Indiana with a story about the Clintons. This is a foreign power, and not just any foreign power, an adversary foreign power.”
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.