Secret Service to Donald Trump’s lying attorney: nice try, genius

| 4:36 pm EDT July 16, 2017
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That didn’t take long: the Secret Service is already pushing back and confirming that Donald Trump’s attorney Jay Sekulow is lying. This marks a swift demise for Trump’s new ‘blame it on the Secret Service’ defense, which was bound to backfire, and shows just how thoroughly out of excuses he and his legal team are. It also just made things a whole lot worse for Trump.

Sekulow appeared on ABC This Week earlier today and tried floating the notion that there couldn’t have been anything illegal and Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with Russian government representatives during the campaign, because the Secret Service would have intervened and broken it up. But anyone with even a basic understanding of law enforcement knows that’s not how the Secret Service works. And anyone with a pocket calendar knows that Donald Trump Jr. didn’t have Secret Service protection way back at the time of his June 9th, 2016 meeting.

That made it particularly easy for the Secret Service to immediately speak up today and make 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: Reuters). In fact this was too easy. The Secret Service didn’t even have to get into the legalities of the meeting, or who might have been in attendance at the meeting; it simply had to broadly point out that it wasn’t protecting Junior at the time. But it gets worse for Trump.

As Palmer Report pointed out just before the Secret Service issued its statement, the only possible way that agents could have been present at that meeting is if Donald Trump himself was in attendance (link). The Secret Service still isn’t saying whether or not its agents were at the meeting. But if records prove that the agents protecting Donald Trump were present, then it proves Trump attended the meeting and participated in the illegal collusion plot. If you find Palmer Report valuable, make a donation.