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Editor’s note: The views expressed by guest columnists are not necessarily those of The Costa Rica Star, its advertisers, or its staff.
Mainstream media’s obsession with the continuing soap-opera-like saga of Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a lawyer from Russia June 9, 2016 at Trump Tower in New York City – President Donald Trump’s home – shows how desperate they are in attempting to find something – anything – illegal going on within the president’s world.
Now they are going after President Trump’s son with full force and so is the U.S. Congress.
This Trump Jr. story does have the unpleasant odor of ‘dirty politics’ with him accepting to meet this lawyer from Russia on the pretense of gaining politically sensitive information on former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In the end, there was no damaging information conveyed to Trump Jr., instead he listened to this lawyer’s pleas concerning human rights and Moscow’s ban on U.S. adoptions of Russian children — which had nothing to do with Clinton or his father’s campaign for president.
It doesn’t help that Trump Jr. is backtracking and restating what happened during this meeting and who attended. First it was four people, now its gone up to eight to 10 people attended including other Trump campaign staffers, and some shady types with Russian connections. Mainstream media just won’t let go of this non-event news story.
Now we learn that this lawyer from Russia – Natalia Veselnitskaya — is a female attorney who was first denied entry into the U.S. by the U.S. State Department. Then Veselnitskaya was granted a special-type permission called a ‘parole’ to enter the U.S. by none other than President Obama’s U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
For the Democrats and mainstream media this Trump Jr. story is backfiring. News reports say Veselnitskaya overstayed her ‘parole’ permission and may have been in the U.S. illegally when the June 2016 meeting occurred. But mainstream media is not after her or Lynch in asking questions about why this lawyer was given an almost unheard of ‘parole’ to enter the U.S. in the first place. Lynch has some explaining to do if anyone bothers to ask. Perhaps this meeting was a pre-meditated ‘dirty trick’ and Trump Jr. fell for it along with the others because they believed they’d get ‘dirt’ on Clinton.
In defense of his son, President Trump issued a brief statement while in France last week.
“My son is a wonderful young man. He took a meeting with a Russian lawyer, not a government lawyer but a Russian lawyer,” Trump said Thursday in a joint press conference in Paris with French President Emmanuel Macron. “From a practical standpoint most people would have taken that meeting. It’s called opposition research or research into your opponent.”
Of course, the Democrats are all screaming Trump Jr. or anyone else should not participate in any kind of “opposition research.” Oh really? Political shenanigans have been going on ever since leaders with followers started making the world go ’round.
How do you think former President Richard Nixon got his nickname “Tricky Dickey?” How do you think former President Bill Clinton got this nickname “Slick Willie?”
Listed among the top 10 dirtiest U.S. politicians of all time is this account of the 1960 John Kennedy-Richard Nixon presidential campaign which Democrat Kennedy won by a slim margin.
Who knew Nixon was victim of political trickery? During his heated 1960 election battle with John F. Kennedy, Nixon fell prey to a number of dirty tricks which many think gave the Democrats a win; one of which was the accusation of tremendous ballot stuffing in two key swing states. The first inkling of Kennedy’s no-holds-barred approach came when he spread the fact that Nixon had secretly taken money from billionaire Howard Hughes, a man whose business relied on government contracts. Various publications, such as TIME magazine, corroborated the story but refused to publish it.
The money in question was a loan for Nixon’s brother and mother totaling $245,000 which Hughes allegedly gave after Nixon promised to grant tax-exempt status to Hughes’s medical institute, though there was no actual evidence that Nixon influenced anything in order to help out Hughes.
This story came out as the result of Kennedy paying the equivalent of $100,000 in today’s money to an LA accountant named Phillip Reiner, who had helped hide Nixon’s role in everything. A break-in at Reiner’s office mysteriously occurred a short time later and the Kennedys were able to pass the documents along to two liberal journalists who had been attacking Nixon for years. The story was then picked up all across the nation and contributed to Kennedy becoming president.” – ListVerse.com.
At least one U.S. Congressional committee — investigating Russia-Trump campaign connections — has asked Trump Jr. to appear and testify under oath about this June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower and news accounts say he has agreed – which is probably a big mistake. There are no accusations of any specific criminal activity from any law enforcement agency, only from the media. Trump Jr.’s testimony would only add fuel to the fire that will go out on its own accord — due to lack of any substance of wrongdoing.
For the sake of their father, Donald Trump Jr. and his brother Eric Trump need to go back to running the Trump Organization, and save what they can of the deteriorating Trump Brand worldwide and stay out of politics altogether.
P.S. For serious political junkies here are two links to the best of dirty USA politics:
About the Author
Britt Nelson relocated to Costa Rica in 2011 from Florida, where he served as news editor for the Palatka Daily News, a newspaper owned by the New York Times Regional Newspaper Group (NYT-RNG) for 20 years.
Nelson served the NYT-RNG for 18 years in Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida as a correspondent, reporter, staff writer, senior staff writer training new reporters, copy editor, page designer, editorial writer, editorial page editor and editorial board member.
