An Insult to Nothingburgers

Oooohhhhh, gotcha!

So apparently some devilish conspiracy zombies have dug up the fact that, in June 2016, Donald Trump Jr., along with Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, both of the Trump campaign's inner circle, had a meeting with a Russian lawyer.

According to those in it, and documented by the younger Trump's immediate release of the relevant emails, it was agreed to because there was some kind of indication that the lawyer had some damaging information on Hillary Clinton that would help with the campaign, which was the premise for the three men agreeing to meet.  However, the information, such as it was or wasn't, turned out to be a pretense to discuss the lifting of a Russian government ban on adoptions of Russian children by Americans.

As of this moment, we think we know that Donald Jr. was unaware of the name of the lawyer prior to the meeting, and that apparently the meeting was set up (according to the lawyer) on short notice.

And, ultimately, nothing was done.  The other two left shortly after the adoption topic took over the discussion, and Donald Jr. left soon after.  There was zero adverse information presented, since that wasn't the purpose of the meeting from the Russian lawyer's perspective.

For this, we have the New York Times, and CNN and the entire leftist media in a fever.  Now, remember that after six months of scrupulous journalism (and a lot of unscrupulous journalism) and two congressional committee investigations, a special counsel and the FBI, not a shred of evidence has emerged to suggest that the Trump campaigned collaborated with the Russian government to affect the outcome of the 2016 election.

In this incident, someone claiming to represent that government (and since denying it) obtained a meeting by lying about having adverse information on Hillary.  No content.  No adverse information.  No collusion.  No Russian government.

That's not good enough for the press, so they have expanded the definition of "Russian government" to include everyone with a Russian accent, and the definition of "conspired to affect the election" to include "met with someone with a Russian accent."  So here we have a meeting that apparently accomplished nothing, whose American members walked out when the actual intended topic arose, and that's supposed to be evidence of ... something.

Naturally, the folks who consider the collusion thing to be a big joke, made up by the crying "Wah, wah, Hillary lost" crowd, see the June meeting as a "nothingburger."  But I suspect that to be an insult to nothingburgers everywhere.

Let us go back to Occam's Razor for the moment.  Occam's Razor is the logical principle that the simplest explanation for a set of facts is the likeliest explanation for them.  So let's put this together.

The lawyer was in some way trying to advocate for an entity seeking to get the ban on adoptions from Russia (a Russian ban, not an American one) lifted, meaning that it needed to get raised in the consciousness of the potential next president.  The entity, whoever they were, had a contact, a person in the entertainment industry, who knew Donald Trump Jr. well enough through the Miss Universe pageants to secure a meeting (we know that) with a lawyer who was a native Russian. 

The pretense for the meeting was that the person (who turned out to be the lawyer) had damaging information on Hillary Clinton that would help the Trump campaign.  And so Donald Jr., who was contacted through a friend trusted enough to make him willing to take yet another meeting, went -- and brought Manafort and Kushner to hear the person out, since it was supposed to be about opposition research.  And every campaign wants dirt (q.v. Hillary's bringing up the "fat" comments about a pageant contestant on the debate floor).

We know that the "information" turned out to be vague references that were sufficiently vague that when the lawyer turned the topic to the intended one, Russian adoption, it quickly drove out Manafort and Kushner and brought the meeting to a swift end.

Duh.

How all this becomes anything other than the Occam's Razor inference I make from the facts, is beyond me.  What, pray tell, was done that was different from what anyone else in the Clinton or Trump campaigns would have done?  You are offered opposition dirt -- which, by the way, campaigns pay people to dig up -- and you take a meeting with someone who purports to have some of that dirt.  It turns out not to be there, so you get up and leave.

This, friends, doesn't even rise to the level of nothingburger.  This is especially true when one realizes that there is some involvement, somewhere, with the same organization that created the phony dossier on candidate Trump for the Democrats.  What that involvement is has been poorly defined, but their name comes up regularly in the reporting, although without a "This is what they did" context.

But it will keep the press busy for a while, at least when they're not out there putting too much ketchup on their nothingburgers.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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