It didn’t appear that things could possibly get any worse for Donald Trump Jr., but thanks to an indictment handed down in a New York federal court Tuesday morning, we now have absolute proof that when Junior met with Russian attorney Natalya Veselnitskaya, he was directly conspiring with the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
As The New York Times reports:
“Ms. Veselnitskaya, a pivotal figure in the investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election, was charged by federal prosecutors in New York with seeking to thwart an earlier Justice Department investigation into money laundering that involved an influential Russian businessman and his investment firm.
“The money-laundering case was not directly related to the Trump Tower meeting. But a federal indictment returned in Manhattan seemed to confirm that Ms. Veselnitskaya had deep ties to senior Russian government officials and rekindled questions about whether the Kremlin tried to use her as an intermediary to Donald J. Trump’s campaign.”
This, as the old saying goes, changes everything.
Ever since it became public knowledge that Don Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner met in June of 2016 at Trump Tower with Veselnitskaya and other Russian nationals, the White House and its propaganda network at Fox News have insisted that the meeting was about adoption. Then they changed their minds and said it was about getting “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, but tried desperately to minimize the effort by saying any campaign would have done the same thing.
Here’s the bottom line for Don Jr.: He knew who he was meeting with and willingly participated in a criminal plot to accept stolen information in order to influence an election. That’s the textbook definition of a conspiracy to defraud the United States, and it tells us that Junior is now looking at spending the rest of his life in prison.
Donald Trump Jr. is now officially toast. And once it’s proven his daddy knew what the Trump Tower meeting was really all about (and it will be) President Trump is also on borrowed time. Today was literally the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency.