Secret Service responds, but doesn’t deny Donald Trump was at Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting
Write down today’s date, because it may go down in history as the day that Donald Trump accidentally outed himself as having personally participated in a treasonous criminal conspiracy while he was trying to blame it on the Secret Service. As surreal as that sounds, it would serve as a fittingly bizarre punctuation mark on an already over the top scandal. And as of a few hours ago, it’s precisely the scenario that we’re now staring in the face.
Donald Trump sent his idiot attorney (no not that one, the other one) Jay Sekulow onto ABC News today with a rather strange excuse for Donald Trump’s campaign meeting with the Kremlin: if it had been illegal, the Secret Service agents in attendance would have put a stop to it. Of course that’s not how anything works. But it does seem to give away that agents were at the meeting. And that’s a remarkable revelation, because Trump Jr. wasn’t yet under Secret Service protection at the time; only his father was.
Very quickly, the Secret Service shot back with the following statement: “Donald Trump, Jr. was not a protectee of the USSS in June, 2016. Thus we would not have screened anyone he was meeting with at that time.” (source: link). If you read those two sentences very closely, you realize that the Secret Service is merely stating that Trump Jr. wasn’t under protection at the time. It’s not saying that its agents weren’t at the meeting.
If there were no Secret Service agents at this meeting, the easiest way for the Secret Service to get itself fully out from under this mess would have been to confirm that its agents were not at the meeting. But instead it sidestepped that detail. And if agents were at that meeting, it means Donald Trump himself was also at his son’s collusion meeting. Trump may have accidentally finished himself off today. If you find Palmer Report valuable, make a donation.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report