So Where Does Junior's Blunder Leave Them?

The President stated publicly that he would like to have the Russians locate the stolen emails. Mr. Smith, indicating in various ways association with General Flynn, launches an initiative focused on finding these communications. A Russian national with government connections is able to schedule a meeting with the most senior circle of the campaign by pledging that she had negative information about Mrs. Clinton. In various ways, public and private, the campaign is making its interest clear, and, at a minimum, it is “assenting” to Russian plans to unearth information that constitutes a clear “thing of value” from a foreign source to influence an election.

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It is also illegal to solicit a contribution or expenditure–any “thing of value”–from a foreign national.

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[A] solicitation may be implied as well as express.

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Donald Trump can’t very well sustain his position that in calling for the Russians to find the missing [Clinton] email [during the campaign], he was merely joking. His campaign was furthering behind closed doors the objective that the candidate was “jokingly” professing. If confirmed and further developed in the Mueller investigation, these facts also bolster the campaign’s exposure to “aiding and abetting” liability for a campaign finance violation.

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A question clearly raised by the new information is whether the Trump campaign’s communications about the hacked emails–through both public statements and private contacts–constituted in effect, for legal purposes, a request or suggestion that funds be spent to acquire the stolen emails. The candidate certainly requested this assistance in his public remarks. Now, in a meeting scheduled with a Russian national with ties to the Putin regime, the campaign made clear that it was actively interested in having this kind of information.

Investigators will presumably explore whether the campaign was interested specifically in the stolen emails. Press reporting suggests that a) the campaign was interested in the emails, because the candidate had said so, and supporters like Mr. Smith was engaged in a concerted effort to find them; and b) both the campaign and Mr. Smith were dealing with Russian nationals in the search for negative information on Mrs. Clinton. At any rate, any support coordinated with the Russians constitutes an illegal contribution from a foreign source.

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It would have been hard for the Russians to mistake the intensity of the campaign’s interest. The very scheduling of the meeting–and the status of the attendees–was sufficient to get the campaign’s point across about what it highly valued and was prepared to take from a foreign source.

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It also bears emphasis that a solicitation need not be successful in order to be illegal.

  Just Security

So that shoots down Junior's defense that they got nothing from the meeting with Veselnitskaya quite nicely.