That's a really long way of saying the Trump Russian stuff was wrong
Yes, it was wrong, but the Trumps definitely contributed to the suspicions, and to the investigation going on for as long as it did.
They should have been up front about the June 9, 2016 meeting at Trump Tower, and then explained that although they had met with Russian operatives for the purpose of receiving dirt on Hillary Clinton, they did not actually receive anything that wasn't already common knowledge and publicly available to anyone who was interested in it. That would have also been the right time to mention that Natalia Veselnitskaya, was a dishonest broker. She didn't have any new information that was damaging to Hillary Clinton, as she had claimed to Rob Goldstone (
who had arranged the June 9, 2016 meeting). She just wanted a face-to-face meeting with members of the 2016 Trump Campaign, so she could lobby them to repeal the Magnitsky Act, if Trump won the election.
Trump would have taken a brief public relations hit over it, but it would have faded away much quicker than getting caught lying about it did. The Trumps knew that the optics of that meeting weren't great, so they lied about who was in attendance at the meeting, and what the objective of the meeting was. That was a mistake.
Whenever approached with uncomfortable information, Donald Trump's default response is to deny everything about it. If he is later exposed for lying, his response is then to insist that okay, I did it, but there is nothing wrong with what I did.
Okay .... Fine .... but why did you lie? Donald Trump never has an answer for that. Trump simply doesn't see anything wrong with lying.
