Fox News analyst says the Trump Tower meeting could amount to criminal conspiracy


If President Trump watched his favorite morning show Tuesday, he was in for a rude surprise. Fox & Friends invited senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano, a former judge, to weigh in on the 2016 meeting between the president's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and a Kremlin-linked attorney at Trump Tower.
Opposition research isn't against the law, Napolitano explained, but there are "federal statutes that prohibit receiving something of value from a foreign national, foreign entity, or foreign government." Whether "the purpose of this meeting was to receive something of value" will be up to Special Counsel Robert Mueller to determine, he said.
Crucially, Napolitano continued, the criminality of the meeting does not depend on whether anything of value was actually obtained: "So if there was an agreement to receive dirt on Hillary [Clinton], from the Russians, even if the dirt never came, if those who agreed, at least one of them, took some step in furtherance of the agreement, then there is the potential crime for conspiracy." In a tweet about the meeting Sunday, Trump emphasized that the arrangement with the Russian lawyer "went nowhere."
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Watch Napolitano's comments in context below. Bonnie Kristian
Watch the latest video at href="http://www.foxnews.com">foxnews.com
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
-
September 6 editorial cartoons
Cartoons Saturday’s political cartoons include profiting from authoritarianism, and the National Guard entering the CDC
-
Should Britain withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights?
Talking Point With calls now coming from Labour grandees as well as Nigel Farage and the Tories, departure from the ECHR 'is starting to feel inevitable'
-
5 outspoken cartoons about Epstein survivors taking center stage
Cartoons Artists take on cover-ups, Trump surrounded, and more
-
DC sues Trump to end Guard 'occupation'
Speed Read D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb argues that the unsolicited military presence violates the law
-
RFK Jr. faces bipartisan heat in Senate hearing
Speed Read The health secretary defended his leadership amid CDC turmoil and deflected questions about the restricted availability of vaccines
-
White House defends boat strike as legal doubts mount
Speed Read Experts say there was no legal justification for killing 11 alleged drug-traffickers
-
Epstein accusers urge full file release, hint at own list
speed read A rally was organized by Reps. Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie, who are hoping to force a vote on their Epstein Files Transparency Act
-
Court hands Harvard a win in Trump funding battle
Speed Read The Trump administration was ordered to restore Harvard's $2 billion in research grants
-
Florida aims to end all state vaccine requirements
Speed Read Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to cut vaccine access and install anti-vaccine activists at the FDA and CDC
-
US kills 11 on 'drug-carrying boat' off Venezuela
Speed Read Trump claimed those killed in the strike were 'positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists' shipping drugs to the US
-
Trump vows to send federal forces to Chicago, Baltimore
Speed Read The announcement followed a California judge ruling that Trump's LA troop deployment was illegal