I'm not claiming absence of bias. But I don't claim allegiance to any one news source, either. My workplace employee lounge has TVs tuned to Fox News and CNBC damn near all day. Then I go home and my wife gets all indignant about stuff she read on CNN.com and Huffpo. In both situations, I find myself rolling my eyes harder than Anderson Cooper.
Politico assembled a bunch of legal and counterintelligence opinions from some experts. They mostly agree that 'collusion' is a meaningless media word. One angle I hadn't considered was toward the bottom of the article.
There is another problem with Trump Jr.’s story as well. His claim that they “only” spoke about the adoption issue does not help him at all. Russian adoptions were stopped by Vladimir Putin because of sanctions put in place by the U.S. government. So it would be almost impossible to discuss the adoption issue without discussing the sanctions issue. It seems very likely that much of what was motivating Russia to help Donald Trump win was because it wanted sanctions relief. So this story is damaging to the president for that reason as well.
--Peter Zeidenberg is a partner at Arent Fox and served as an assistant special counsel in the prosecution of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby