Editorial: We need answers on Trump and Russia
There Donald Trump Jr. was the other night, smiling and lighthearted, answering sympathetic questions from Sean Hannity, who famously advised the Trump campaign behind the scenes last year.
In essence, Trump Jr. said his now-acknowledged attempt to get intelligence on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government was no big deal because he presumably was unsuccessful in getting any.
President Donald J. Trump defended his 39-year-old son, as you'd expect a father might do, calling him "a wonderful young man" and saying, "Most people would have taken the meeting" with Russian government-connected attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya who was presented as a conduit for Kremlin dirt on Clinton.
Sadly, Trump apologists within the Republican Party seemed only too eager immediately to toe the talking paper line that this somehow is more evidence of "a witch hunt" that hasn't led anywhere.
Let's put aside, for now, the argument that some have made that actually, what Trump Jr., Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and then campaign chairman Paul Manafort did in accepting the meeting with Veselnitskaya could be a violation of a federal law against a political campaign knowingly soliciting a contribution of any sort from a foreign national.
Laughable, you say? Then why was the loquacious president himself referring reporters to Trump Jr.'s attorney for further comment?
What's truly laughable is the president's praise of his son's "transparency" in this episode.
Trump Jr. did not acknowledge the June 2016 meeting until The New York Times was about to reveal it, and his first attempt at acknowledging it misrepresented the reason for it.
He also failed to acknowledge the presence in the meeting of Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian American lobbyist whose participation was reported by the news media Friday.
The Daily Beast further reported that Akhmetshin was described in court two years ago as "a former Soviet military counterintelligence officer" by a Russian mining company that alleged he had hacked into its computer systems.
The likelihood that Russia attempted to interfere in our democracy is a threat to all of us, not just to one party or ideology.
All of us should be concerned.
That includes Republicans. We need suburban GOP representatives including Randy Hultgren and Peter Roskam to demonstrate their allegiance to country first.
We don't know what involvement the Trump campaign may or may not have had with Russian meddlers.
But we do know this is not a witch hunt. It is national security.
We all need to take a stand on behalf of our country and demand answers.