The sense over the recent reports of Donald Trump Jr. taking a meeting with a Kremlin lawyer has been that it's given every indication now that the Trump campaign did in fact collude with Russian officials. Since the New York Times broke the story, they've only revealed more details that incriminate the Trump White House even more.

More incriminating as story develops

Initially, Trump Jr. said that he provided everything there was to know about the meeting while the legal council at the White House helped spin a new conspiracy against Democrats to start blaming them as the source of Russian collusion.

Then, emails were released that showed a discussion between Trump Jr. and Rob Goldberg, who arranged the meeting and said that the Russian government had obtained valuable and incriminating information against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.

Before the end of the week, a new person was revealed as being at that meeting who was reportedly a Russian operative. As this was unfolding, one has to wonder how much easier this case has become for special prosecutor Robert Mueller to investigate. In an article by Politico titled: "Trump Jr. delivers 'smoking gun' to Mueller", various veteran prosecutors and white-collar defense attorneys said that the recent revelations were as incriminating as incriminating could get.

Illegal 'nothing burgers'

Peter Zeidenberg, a former prosecutor for the Department of Justice said that Donald Trump Jr's intent to collude with the Russian officials on behalf of the Trump campaign was clear. Samuel Buell, who is a former prosecutor and who happened to work with a deputy under the direction of Mueller when he led the FBI, repeated this view by saying that the campaign was benefiting from getting their information illegally from Russian sources.

This is despite the fact that White House lawyer Jay Sekulow has said that there was nothing illegal there. Buell was involved in prosecuting Enron executives in 2000. Buell also pointed out that when Reince Priebus has always said that these Trump-Russia stories were always "nothing burgers" at first, that they always end up turning into "Whoppers" afterwards.

He suggested that it might be time for Congress to start accepting the fact that collusion took place rather than act as if it didn't exist.

The view now is that because Trump Jr. said "I love it" in his emails over the chance he would be getting information against the Trump campaign's rival, and that this shows he had accepted the help from the Russian government and that is therefore evidence of collusion. Needless to say, the administration has continued to deny any collusion or that anything happened at the meeting. But even with this -- and even though the White House has already built its wall of legal defense -- last week the Trump administration added another lawyer to their team over this story, one that will apparently be yet another person Mueller will have to go through for anything related to Russia.
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED