Don Jr. confesses: Emails show Russian meeting was about "government's support for Trump"

In a bizarre move that only makes the situation that much worse, Donald Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. released what he claims is the complete email thread about setting up a meeting with a Kremlin-linked attorney.

The exchanges show that Trump Jr. thought he was going to be receiving information to help his father’s presidential campaign from what he believed were Russian government sources.

The emails begin with an offer from Rob Goldstone, a long-time crony of the Trump family. Goldstone writes that he has been asked to be an intermediary to provide the Trump team with information from the “Crown prosecutor of Russia,” whom he describes as “obviously very high level and sensitive information” that “is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Trump Jr. responds by saying “if it’s what you say I love it especially in the later in the summer”:

Here's my statement and the full email chain pic.twitter.com/x050r5n5LQ

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 11, 2017

Here is page 4 (which did not post due to space constraints). pic.twitter.com/z1Xi4nr2gq

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 11, 2017

In a later email, Goldstone refers to scheduling a “meeting with you and the Russian government attorney who is flying down from Moscow for this on Thursday.”

Trump Jr. included a statement about the meeting in which he tries to minimize the meeting, once again asserting the woman was not a “not a government official” and “wanted to talk about adoption policy.”

If these emails are real — and not some ploy on the Trump team’s behalf to disseminate fake news to further muddy the ongoing investigations into the campaign’s potential collusion — they are absolutely devastating.

Trump Jr. went into the meeting with the expectation and intention of receiving information from the Russian government to take down Hillary Clinton and help his father win the White House. Trump and his team clearly can no longer pretend that’s not exactly what they were trying to do.