At a critical juncture in Donald Trumps presidential campaign last year, his son Donald Trump Jr. met with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer who promised to share political dirt on Hillary Clinton. Paul Manafort, Mr. Trumps campaign chairman at the time, and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trumps son-in-law and a key strategist, also attended.
The June 9, 2016, meeting is of obvious interest to Robert Mueller III, the Justice Department special counsel investigating the Trump teams potential involvement in Russias effort to influence the presidential election. In two clumsy statements over the weekend, the younger Mr. Trump on Saturday said the meeting was related to Russias freezing of an adoption program popular with Americans. When confronted a day later with a Times story citing authoritative sources that Ms. Veselnitskaya had promised damaging material on Mrs. Clinton, he said that the information she supplied was essentially meaningless and merely a pretext for discussing the adoption issue.
On the face of it, this seemed a clear though perhaps unintended admission by Donald Trump Jr. that he had gone into the meeting expecting damaging information, and the episode is clearly grist for Mr. Muellers mill. As is a report Monday night by The Times that the presidents son had received an email saying Ms. Veselnitskayas information came from Moscow. But his shifty statements are also further evidence of how freely his father and the people around the president contort the truth. Only six months in, President Trump has compiled a record of dishonesty ranging from casual misstatements to flat-out lies without precedent in the modern presidency. Equally disheartening is his teams willingness to share in his mendacity.
On Sunday, before Donald Trump Jr. acknowledged that there was a Clinton-related aspect to the meeting, Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, was on Fox News suggesting that the Veselnitskaya episode was a big nothingburger for the Trump campaign.
If a culture of dishonesty takes root in an administration, how can Americans believe anything its officials say? Take, for instance, the matter of whether President Vladimir Putin of Russia personally directed Moscows hacking of the 2016 presidential election. In statements dating from his first days in office until the eve of his meeting with Mr. Putin in Germany last week, when he said nobody really knows, Mr. Trump has deflected and sought to discredit his own intelligence agencies finding that Moscow, at Mr. Putins direction, tried to disrupt the election to help him win. Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, said after the American and Russian presidents met in Hamburg that they had a very robust and lengthy exchange on the subject and that Mr. Trump had pressed Mr. Putin on the issue. Later, Mr. Trump made much the same claim on Twitter. The Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, had quite a different version of the facts, suggesting that Mr. Trump had characterized the hacking controversy as a campaign against Russia in which not a single fact has been produced. So whom should Americans believe? In a more credible administration, who would ever ask?
On Monday, Donald Trump Jr. hired a lawyer, while maintaining on Twitter that hed been forthright in answering questions about the meeting last year. Meanwhile, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, deputy press secretary, blew more smoke: The only thing I see inappropriate about the meeting, she said, is that it was leaked to the media.