The ongoing so-called scandal involving Donald Trump Jr has come to a head recently. The New York Times claims to have discovered that he did indeed have an offer from Russian contacts to give him some incriminating information on Hillary Clinton. But nothing came of the offer.
There’s no information about the nature of the exchange, except that the Russian individual who offered the dirt on Hillary was a lawyer and that he either had nothing to offer and was running a kind of phishing scam, or he only mistakenly believed he had something Trump Jr could use.
Some people have speculated that the whole meeting was an attempted sting operation by Democrats to try to catch people associated to Donald Trump doing untoward things with Russian agents. If this was the case, then Trump Jr could probably tell early on that the situation was a ruse, since the Democrats wouldn’t have access to any convincingly Russian assets.
However, for Democrats and the mainstream media to make a mountain out of this molehill, all that’s needed is for Trump Jr to meet with a Russian offering anything even loosely related to last year’s election.
What the New York Times will not tell its readers is that it is not illegal for a person to be offered advantageous information. Neither is it illegal for a person to look into the nature of that information and then turn his nose up at it.
This scenario would only be likely, however, if the Democrats involved had some way to know that the internal election polling they had was not going to be reliable for one reason or another. At that point, the DNC had very optimistic internal polling numbers which, if they believed in the veracity of these polls, would have no reason to orchestrate a sting on Trump Jr.
The other possibility is that the Russian lawyer’s information wasn’t as useful as he thought it was. This may be the most likely situation. After all, the proven criminality of Hillary Clinton at that point was so voluminous and clear that it would take a foreigner to fail to realize that even that isn’t enough to take Clinton down.
In other words, Trump Jr’s Russian contact was probably a bit naïve, and simply couldn’t believe that he was offering Trump something that every American already knew about – proof of Clinton’s many crimes.
Of course, none of this places Donald Trump Jr anywhere near the wrong side of the law. There was no exchange. No information that wasn’t already mutually shared crossed hands. Even if Trump Jr did take information from a Russian lawyer, that still doesn’t mean that Donald Trump himself had benefited from it in any way.
After all, we have reams of information on the criminality of Hillary Clinton, and nothing happens. Nevertheless, it only takes the hint of a Russian meeting for the media to whip the story up into a phony controversy.
It’s worth noting that Trump Jr was not directly working on his father’s presidential campaign, nor does he directly work with the Trump Administration in Washington DC. On top of this, there was no information exchanged, so no election law can have been broken since Trump Jr didn’t have any incriminating information to pass to his father in the run up to November 2016.
This is, to use one of the left’s current favorite terms, a “nothing burger”. There was no collusion, no crime, and nothing to report on – at least not in the way of criminal intent. The real story here is the New York Times itself, a failing news organization which is undergoing major cutbacks in both personnel, capital, and scope.
The paper, a long-time standard of American journalism, sold six floors of its office building in New York, and has made a significant portion of its staff redundant in an effort to remain financially solvent while alternative media continues to assert its dominance in journalism.
On other fronts, CNN is experiencing similarly dire straights as their ratings plummet. Among the major news networks, the only one that still holds any shred of credibility is MSNBC – and that’s a low standard.
Indeed, the Trump Jr Russian collusion story is just another distraction from the ongoing collapse of the legacy media.
~ Conservative Zone
