Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer talked about the revelation of Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign on Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily with SiriusXM host Alex Marlow.
“First of all, when I read the email exchange from Goldstone talking to Donald Trump Jr. about this meeting, I kind of thought it was either a setup or a joke,” said Schweizer. “Because the email so on-the-nose and direct about ‘hey, somebody’s got information to help your dad from the Russian government.’ It’s the sort of thing that speaks of either not a very sophisticated operation, or a hoax.”
“I don’t believe it was a hoax,” he added. “I don’t believe it was a setup. I do believe that this was an attempt to get a meeting with people in Trump’s circle. It does not appear that there was any information that was exchanged.”
“Look, it was a very stupid, dumb thing to even take a meeting,” Schweizer declared. “I think a basic element of Politics 101, I would say, is if somebody comes to you that’s either say Chinese or Russian, in this context, and says ‘we want to give you information to help you win a campaign,’ the best thing for anybody to do is to just stay away. So I think it was an incredibly stupid thing to do.”
Marlow posited that someone in Trump Jr.’s position as a non-politician working in a longshot presidential campaign would be hard-pressed to turn down an offer of blockbuster negative information about the opposing candidate.
Schweizer had a few suggestions for anyone caught in such a position: “First of all, I think you do turn down the meeting. What you can certainly do is say, ‘Look, any information they have that they think is helpful, they can pass along.’ But the optics – particularly such a crude attempt, where they clearly didn’t do any vetting and didn’t have any context of trying to understand who this person was, you’re getting an email that says this is coming from the Russian government – it’s just a bad scenario.”
“That said, Alex, it’s very important for people to know that there are a lot of people in political circles in Washington right now running around apoplectic, pretending like this is some shocking thing. The fact of the matter is, if you look through the expanse of American political history including recent political history, this sort of stuff goes on a lot more than people think,” he continued.
“What I would encourage people to do if they’ve got the time for, I say jokingly, ‘light summer reading,’ pick up the memoirs of Anatoly Dobrynin, who was the dean of the Soviet diplomatic service for 30 years, the Soviet ambassador in Russia,” Schweizer recommended.
“In his memoirs, published in the mid-1990s, he gives hair-raising accounts very calmly told about being approached by the Jimmy Carter campaign in 1980, the Walter Mondale campaign in 1984, conversations that he says he had with Senator Ted Kennedy, in which all of these individuals were saying ‘let’s work together to undermine Reagan’s election and Reagan’s re-election because we have this common opposition to this terrible, evil person,’” he elaborated.
“Especially experienced political hands that are pretending like, ‘Oh my gosh, this has never happened before, this is frightening’ are either completely ignorant of American history, or are putting on a demonstration for political reasons,” he said.
Schweizer assessed the Trump Jr. story as “something that needs to be further looked into,” and “an important lesson for people around the president or anybody in politics.”
“If you are approached in this way from somebody that’s a rival country – and Russia is a rival country, as China is, to the United States – you don’t take these meetings. You don’t have these kinds of conversations,” he advised.
Peter Schweizer is head of the Government Accountability Institute and author of the best-selling book Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.