538 The Latest Trump-Russia Story Has The Makings Of A Blockbuster
We don’t cover every Trump-Russia story here at FiveThirtyEight. Some of them can be repetitive, such as the many iterations of the now-familiar narrative around the controversial work that President Trump’s onetime campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, did in Ukraine. Others are heavily reliant on unnamed sources or make vague claims, which means they’re complicated to understand and hard to verify.
But The New York Times’s weekend story, which details Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting last June with a Russian lawyer from whom he hoped to receive negative information about Hillary Clinton, is significant. It has the potential to stick to the president for three reasons:
First, this meeting involved President Trump’s inner circle. Manafort and Jared Kushner joined Donald Trump Jr. at the meeting, which is important because they were two of the top officials in Trump’s presidential campaign at the time.
But this meeting also involved one of president’s sons. The president will have trouble distancing himself from Donald Trump Jr. the way he did from Manafort, Michael Flynn, Carter Page and others in his orbit who have publicly confirmed dealings with Russian figures. Even if the president did not attend and was not informed about this meeting, as a spokesman for his attorney told the Times, it’s hard to imagine any campaign personnel who would be more closely connected to him than one of his children.
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