According to an email that Donald Trump Jr. himself shared with the public, he was approached by one of his father’s former Russian business partners with an offer from a senior Russian government official to provide the Trump campaign with negative information on Hillary Clinton. Trump Jr. replied, “If it’s what you say I love it,” and scheduled the meeting, inviting the Trump campaign manager and his brother-in-law, who was advising the campaign.

The meeting took place in June 2016 just after Donald Trump became the Republican Party’s nominee for president.  In the interview that follows, criminal law experts from Stanford Law School, professors Robert Weisberg and David Sklansky, answer questions about the law and the meeting.

Was the meeting that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort held with a Russian national in itself illegal?

Sklansky: Being in the same room wasn’t illegal.  Whether the meeting was illegal depends on what was said and done – and on what the Trump people were trying to accomplish.

Weisberg: The mere fact of meeting was not illegal.

There has been some debate playing out in the media about a violation of 52 U.S. Code Section 30121 of our campaign finance laws. Can you talk about that?

Weisberg: There’s a plausible charge here, but it would depend on a number of issues never resolved by a federal court. Most obviously, was the information he solicited a “thing of value”? Common sense says yes, but the closest precedents are in the area of the federal bribery laws, which suggest that while something “intangible” can be a thing of value, it has to have a fairly monetizable value. Information might be a thing of value if, in effect, it is the “deliverable” of some sort of expensive information-gathering or analysis service, but otherwise it’s dubious. The “willfully” term in the statute will leave Trump Jr.  with the not-quite-absurd but very weak argument that it requires proof that he knew of the terms of the criminal law at issue here.

Sklansky: That statute makes it illegal for foreign nationals to contribute to U.S. election campaigns, and illegal for anyone to solicit or receive a contribution to a U.S. election campaign from a foreign national.  The contribution can be of money or any “thing of value.”  It’s not entirely clear whether dirt on a political opponent counts as a “thing of value” for purposes of the statute.

Read More