Trump Jr. Lacked The ‘Mental Capacity’ To Be Charged By Mueller, Former Pentagon And CIA Chief Of Staff Says
When news surfaced that the eldest son of President Donald Trump wouldn’t face charges from Robert Mueller, following him submitting his final report on the Russia investigation to Attorney General William Barr in March, a lot of people were caught off guard.
That’s because, by all accounts, everyone figured Trump Jr. was going to be indicted with a crime — including Trump Jr. himself.
Trump Jr.’s impending indictment was assumed by some pundits to be a given, seeing that he expressed excitement at the prospects of meeting with a Russian lawyer (who had deep ties to Moscow), who promised him dirt on Democratic candidate for president Hillary Clinton, during the 2016 campaign.
Not only was he excited by that idea, he followed through and met with the lawyer, per reporting from Real Clear Politics.
Surprise abounded across the political world when Trump Jr. wasn’t indicted by Mueller following the latter’s submission of the Russia report. But a new theory from Jeremy Bash, an MSNBC contributor and former chief of staff at the CIA and the Pentagon, posits that Trump Jr. was simply too inept to commit a crime.
Bash theorized that Trump Jr. simply didn’t know what was going on, and therefore his intent for the meeting couldn’t be construed as being legitimate collusion. Yet Bash also expressed that it was still important to see the full Mueller report to know for sure why Mueller didn’t charge the president’s son.
“Whether the special counsel concluded at the end of the day that someone like Don, Jr. didn’t have the mental capacity — and I use that term specifically — because he didn’t have the intent, because he didn’t understand politics, whatever the basis for saying a crime wasn’t committed is important to know,” Bash said.
Earlier in the program, Bash attempted to remind his fellow panelists and viewers watching him on MSNBC’s “Deadline White House” with host Nicolle Wallace that, no matter what conclusions are seen within Mueller’s final report on Thursday (redacted or otherwise), this is a spectacular and stunning moment in American history.
“I think we have to zoom back and look at what’s happening at this moment in our democracy,” Bash said, “which is a special counsel is going to be issuing a report on the conduct of a presidential campaign, a candidate, and a president ultimately that amounts to a heap of shameful, unpatriotic, and unethical conduct where the president sought Russian interference, he received Russian interference, he benefitted from Russian interference, and he rewarded Russian interference.”