It might just be bad judgment, or it might be treason.
It might just be bad judgment, or it might be treason.
Legal experts are divided on whether there was anything illegal about Donald Trump Jr. arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer last year who claimed to have damning information about Hillary Clinton.
The meeting has once again raised questions about potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and whether the Trump family can be trusted to tell the truth.
But it also raises questions about whether the President’s eldest son stepped over the law.
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Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe deemed the meeting “attempted theft of a presidential election” and “a high crime against the state, ” but he did not specify exactly what law Trump Jr. might have broken.
A former ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush went as far as saying Trump Jr. committed treason .
“He must have known that the only way Russia would get such information was by spying, ” Richard Painter tweeted after The New York Times broke the story.
“In the Bush Administration we would have had him in custody for questioning by now.”
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But a treason charge would be unlikely to stick, let alone come in the first place. The crime is rarely prosecuted — there have been about 30 treason cases in United States history — in part because it requires the high bar of proving a citizen was “levying war” against the United States.
Michael Gerhardt, a law professor who testified in President Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearings, said Trump’s most likely offense could have been violating a federal election law against soliciting something “of value” from foreign nationals.
“It could be argued that Trump Jr. was doing that, ” Gerhardt, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told the Daily News.
The Times reported that Trump set up a meeting in Trump Tower with Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya after she promised damaging information about Clinton, just weeks after Donald Trump clinched the GOP nomination. Trump Jr. brought campaign manager Paul Manafort and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner with him.
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Trump claimed that Veselnitskaya quickly revealed that she had “no meaningful information, ” and she instead pressed the Trump associates about a Russian adoption program.
Based on Trump’s statement, “he was sitting there and evaluating whether she had anything to share, ” Gerhardt said.
“The thing to do was stand up and walk out of the room. He was sitting there thinking she was in possession of information (on Clinton) .”
But since Trump claimed Veselnitskaya approached him with the intel offer, it would be trickier to prove he actively solicited anything from her. There is also no evidence now that anyone in the Trump campaign offered anything in exchange.
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“Based on this single incident, it would be hard to show there was an actual crime committed, ” Gerhardt said.
“You need bad faith and you need a bad act. You could still argue that neither of those happened.”
Gerhardt said the most damaging result of this story might be new questions about whether the Trump family or campaign is hiding any other secret Kremlin talks. This meeting alone contradicts the campaign’s previous claims that it never had any conversations with Russian nationals.
“I suspect it was not an isolated meeting, as probably a lot of other people suspect, ” Gerhardt said.
“It’s not an unreasonable suspicion to now ask: Who else did you meet with and what did you talk about?”
