the comments that they are making about any type of information on hillary clinton were vague, they were meaningless. others exited the meeting very quickly. then on tuesday, with the new york times ready to publish the e-mail exchange, donald trump jr. tweets it himself, including a june 3rd e-mail offering, quote, information that would incriminate hillary and her dealings with russia and would be very useful to your father. the meetings broker s publicist rob goldstone, adding this is obviously very high level and sensitive information, but is part of russia and its government s support for mr. trump. trump junior responds, if it s what you say, i love it, especially later in the summer. tuesday night, story number four. for me this was opposition research, they had something maybe concrete evidence to all the stories i had been hearing about that were probably underreported for years, not just during the campaign. so i think i wanted to hear it out. but really it went now
about him. arthel: certainly the media looking into all of this under a glaring microscope, if you will, is it possible that the media are making too much out of this donald trump jr. meeting? and as the president has said this, as well as his spokes people, do you agree with that, that the media is making too much out of this? i think many in the media already had the headline written that president trump was colluding with the russian government and therefore was not the legitimate president of the united states. i think that is the story that wants to be written. the headline was written before there was any evidence to get there. so i do believe that, you know, we have been going after this russia thing for a long time with nothing there, but because this e-mail exchange between don jr. came up, i do think now we have to, you know, we have to do some more investigating to make sure we do figure out how much the russian government was involved in this. i do think, you know, we sho
trump campaign. and they find out there are districts in michigan and pennsylvania where hillary s support is weak. what happens with that information? do they give that to the russians so the russian spamming and all their bots and sending out negative information in pennsylvania about hillary clinton to specific people. did that happen because the trump campaign told them where they were weak? if it did, that s something of value that we need to know about. but probably this two-page memo that talked about the dnc lawyer, i wouldn t say that s anything of value for the purposes of the statute. okay. let s take a listen to part of the nightly news report breaking down the e-mail exchange which led to the meeting. here it is. on june 3rd, 2016, a trusted associate e-mails trump junior that one of donald trump s former business partners had been contacted with a senior russian government official and was offering the trump campaign information that would incriminate hillary clinton
russia may have meddled, but there was no collusion or communications between the trump campaign and the russians. i think that this meeting calls this into very, very grave doubt. the key thing we learned this week, with this e-mail exchange, where donald trump, jr. was promised damaging information on hillary clinton in an e-mail that indicated that that was part of a russian government effort to help his father. and not only was he not reluctant to take that meeting, he was positively enthusiastic about that possibility. that is what makes it, in my opinion, such a major crisis. elizabeth: and my last question, are you more concerned about the names you learned in the past 24 hours than the list when we heard of the meeting? i understand that you re saying it s the greatest crisis next. to me, the names don t necessarily make it worse on a substantive basis.
trying to influence our democracy. as marco rubio has said, this time it was one party and one presidential candidate and next time it will be the other party. so we have an obligation to get to the bottom of this and to allow the special counsel to do their job. but at the same time, congress and especially the senate should be holding hearings because those are in public so the public understands what s going on here. one of the other things that s really struck me in that e-mail exchange and again, we don t know if that s the full e-mail exchange. but it wasn t just that they were pitching dirt. it was that the sentence where they say that the russian government is backing donald trump or wants donald trump to win the election and there was no reaction from or apparently in those e-mails that we saw from donald trump jr. of surprise. that seems to be a major headline for someone in the midst of a campaign to discover and yet it seemed almost like a second reference or that this