Talk about faint praise…

The ‘transparency’ only happened when Junior was notified that the emails were going to be published.

TAPPER: I asked [Mook] about the DNC leak, and he suggested that experts are saying that Russians were behind both the leak, the hacking of the DNC emails and their release. He seemed to be suggesting that this is part of a plot to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton. Your response.

TRUMP JR: It just goes to show you their exact moral compass. I mean, they’ll say anything to be able to win this. I mean, this is time and time again, lie after lie. You notice, he won’t say, ‘well I say this.’ We hear experts. His house cat at home once said that this is what’s happening with the Russians. It’s disgusting. It’s so phony.

The June 3, 2016, email sent to Donald Trump Jr. could hardly have been more explicit: One of his father’s former Russian business partners had been contacted by a senior Russian government official and was offering to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Hillary Clinton.

The documents “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” read the email, written by a trusted intermediary, who added, “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

If the future president’s eldest son was surprised or disturbed by the provenance of the promised material — or the notion that it was part of a continuing effort by the Russian government to aid his father’s campaign — he gave no indication.

He replied within minutes: “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

Four days later, after a flurry of emails, the intermediary wrote back, proposing a meeting in New York on Thursday with a “Russian government attorney.”

Donald Trump Jr. agreed, adding that he would most likely bring along “Paul Manafort (campaign boss)” and “my brother-in-law,” Jared Kushner, now one of the president’s closest White House advisers.

On June 9, the Russian lawyer was sitting in the younger Mr. Trump’s office on the 25th floor of Trump Tower, just one level below the office of the future president.

The emails: here
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/11/us/politics/donald-trump-jr-email-text.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=a-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

How many times have Trump and his people been caught lying about meeting with the Russians?

Trump Jr. KNEW that he was working with the Russian government to aide his father’s campaign
Trump Jr. Was Told in Email of Russian Effort to Aid Campaign

Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email.

The email to the younger Mr. Trump was sent by Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid reporter who helped broker the June 2016 meeting. In a statement on Sunday, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he was interested in receiving damaging information about Mrs. Clinton, but gave no indication that he thought the lawyer might have been a Kremlin proxy.

Mr. Goldstone’s message, as described to The New York Times by the three people, indicates that the Russian government was the source of the potentially damaging information. It does not elaborate on the wider effort by Moscow to help the Trump campaign. There is no evidence to suggest that the promised damaging information was related to Russian government computer hacking that led to the release of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails.

But the email is likely to be of keen interest to the Justice Department and congressional investigators, who are examining whether any of President Trump’s associates colluded with the Russian government to disrupt last year’s election. American intelligence agencies have determined that the Russian government attempted to sway the election in favor of Mr. Trump.

Seems like Donny Jr’s only left himself the lame defense that there turned out to be no dirt on Clinton, so no harm, no foul.

Uh, no.

Apparently, the wingnut spin machine has gone into full panic mode concerning this particular story and has started a viral email campaign to explain why “there’s nothing to this”. He called with a full list of talking points, which he had obviously been provided with only recently, which I then proceeded to demolish one by one.

Eventually, even he was convinced that I was right, that is, that perhaps this story on its own meant little. But in context with multiple other similar incidents and events and with the exaggerated and virulent reaction on the Right to divert attention and distract us from them, suggests that maybe something is going on and at the very least it begs further scrutiny.

And of course, then came his pathetic rear guard actions to cover his retreat.

1) Well, I’m sure the Democrats do the same thing too.
2) All politicians are crooked, you can’t trust any of them.
3) There’s no point in getting worked up over this, there’s nothing we can do about it anyway.

All three of these may be true, but 3) is particularly instructive. First, HE was the one who called ME. Second, surrendering and getting out and giving up on trying to understand or change things is exactly what the fascists want. They demand zealotry in their friends, but will settle for apathy from their enemies.