Conservative editorials savage Donald Trump Jr. over Russia meeting, damning email chain

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published 12 July 2017

President Trump's "high quality" son Donald Trump Jr. was not spared in even conservative editorials after he published his damning emails Tuesday. The New York Post's editorial board brutally declared Trump Jr. "an idiot" for not only setting up a meeting with a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer who claimed to have compromising information about Hillary Clinton, but also for being "so careless with the email trail that it all wound up being fed to The New York Times" — though not before he attempted to preempt the Times by publishing the emails himself. "Dumb. Dumb. Dumb," the Post's editorial said, concluding that the whole thing was "criminally stupid."

National Review similarly laid into Trump Jr. in an editorial, writing that "no campaign professional would have accepted such a dodgy meeting the way Trump Jr. did, and no person with a strong sense of propriety — Russia is a hostile power run by a deeply corrupt regime — would have wanted to." The editorial board argued that the meeting certainly "doesn't prove collusion, but it does demonstrate the seriousness of this matter."

The Washington Examiner's editorial board, however, contended that Trump Jr.'s emails do offer "evidence of collusion, or a willingness to collude, with Russia." "Even if no actual work was done, high-level Trump campaign aides were willing to work with someone identified to them as operating on the Russian government's behalf," the editorial said. "There may be more evidence coming of lies told along the way, perhaps under oath, in the form of past denials that any such communication or collusion occurred, by people in the know."