On Monday’s “Morning Joe,” a legal expert went so far as to suggest Donald Trump, Jr. could go to jail for participating in a previously undisclosed meeting between Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin.
MSNBC justice and security analyst Matthew Miller said the most damaging thing is what Trump Jr. has already admitted to.
“It’s a crime to solicit or accept anything from a foreign national in a campaign,” Miller said. “It doesn’t have to be money… it can be, potentially, accepting information. So he’s potentially confessing in his statement to committing a crime.
The meeting — which was held in June of last year, two weeks after Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination — was first reported by The Times on Saturday and is the first confirmed private meeting between Trump’s inner circle and the Russians.
Trump Jr. said that he met with the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, at the request of an acquaintance from the Miss Universe pageant. When they met, he said the lawyer “stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Mrs. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”
“The only way to trust what any of these people say is to put them in the Grand Jury, put them under oath,” Miller said on MSNBC. “If Donald Trump Jr. has the kind of shifting statements to a Grand Jury as he did to the New York Times, he’ll go to jail for that.”
Veselnitskaya denied that the presidential campaign was discussed during the meeting and said she “never acted on behalf of the Russian government.”
Check out the video above.