Vox: The NYT story blows Junior's "best defense out of the water."

https://www.vox.com/world/2017/7/10/15950590/donald-trump-jr-new-york-times-illegal

In order to actually nail Donald Trump Jr. on solicitation charges, experts say, prosecutors need to be able to show that he knew the person he was meeting with was a foreign national. If Trump Jr. believed that Veselnitskaya was American when he requested information from her, then he would not have been soliciting information from the Russians.

Trump Jr.’s Sunday statement gives him a tiny bit of wiggle room on this point. In it, he says: “I was not told her name prior to the meeting,” implying that he didn’t know much about the person he was meeting — perhaps including, among other things, her nationality.

According to Goodman, the former Defense Department special counsel, this line is the one thing that keeps Trump Jr.’s statement of from being a clear-cut confession of having violated the law. “I think it would turn on the fact of whether he knew he was going to be meeting with a Russian national,” he says.

But if the Times is correct, Goodman says, this excuse is blown out of the water. The email would prove that Trump Jr. went into the meeting with knowledge that he was going to the meeting in an attempt to solicit information from the Russian government.

If Bauer, Goodman, and Hasen are reading the statute correctly, then Trump Jr. has now openly admitted damaging facts that prosecutors would otherwise need to prove to make a case against him. And the New York Times has reported on the existence of an email — something that would be relatively easy for prosecutors to find if the Times’ sources are correct — that would prove that Trump Jr.’s intent was to solicit information from a foreign source. It seems likely that this is exactly what federal prosecutors are going to look into.

SNIP