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Crack pots. thats why you always bring someone else along to see what kind of crazy stuff they might say. >> brian lanza, to counter that, though, ive seen quotes from donald trump, jr., talking about the difficulty of doing business in russia. and one of the problems is, you never know who youre meeting with and you never know their agenda. hes savvy enough, to jasons point, but he knew enough about russia to know that its kind of a murky area and you dont know who youre meeting with. >> i dont...

That would be very consistent with their m.o. she would not necessarily have to have any of the information, and she might go on -- go into that meeting, you know, with another pretext, but the end goal of it for the russian intelligence services and for the russian government would be to say, lets just see if we can get somebody in the campaign to say, yeah, we can talk about that. and then they know that theyre halfway home. >> in this case, they got a meeting with the presidents eldest son, o...

Points in the direction of what this entire narrative has been about all along, right? trying to demonstrate some sort of link, some piece of evidence between the trump campaign and russian actors, be they state actors themselves or people doing their bidding in an effort to influence the election. this "times" story has a lot of delimiting information. we have to be careful about that. there are gaps we have to fill. there are things we can take away based on the story that we know. one of thos...

To argue then -- >> its not subtle. >> to argue then that you had no idea that this russian attorney -- according to "the new york times," this russian attorney has connections to the kremlin. it certainly would seem to indicate if its a russian government effort to help your fathers campaign and we want you to meet with this russian attorney, it would seem like in anybodys mind, they would be linked. accurately or not. >> but without knowing the contents of the conversation, i think that to my ...

>> why waste his timesome >> matt, do you think donald trump, jr. has any legal exposure here? >> i dont. and heres why. somebody mentioned the idea of a thing of value that was given here. this is what obviously happened is this russian lawyer used a ruse or a pretext to get this meeting, saying i had all this great dirt. gave worthless information. we would all agree on this panel that the russians did not fund the dnc and hillary clintons campaign. so she got the meeting and she talked about ...

May be irrelevant because well see what was sent to him. well have a better understanding what his knowledge was going into this meeting. there are two important things to underline from this story. a, theres an e-mail. so now it sort of can make a little more sense if donald trump jr. and his legal team is aware of the e-mail, why they updated their statement and why he wanted to get out there and explain everything he knew about this meeting, or if not everything, at least the pretext, as he c...

About damaging information for hillary clinton. do you know of any evidence that suggests thats not true? >> i dont, and the explanation that it was about russian adoptions, can you imagine youre running for the highest office in the land, time is your most precious resource, and youre taking time out of your day to meet with russian adoptions, and then when youre confronted about it, you give multiple shifting explanations? its just contact with russia denying that the contacts exist and only w...

Explaintive. we have two people that were also in the meeting that corroborate what was discussed. and it is concerning, the news we had come out tonight from "new york times," where you know, three people who have seen some e-mail that i nor john has seen, that suggest that don, jr. knew that this potential evidence that actually was never brought to the meeting bauds it didnt exist, it was just a pretext, but nonetheless this was a source from the russian government. im not as quick to cast gu...

Some lawyer came over and wanted to set m up a meeting. it was under the pretext of dirt on hillary. she didnt have it. and they said "all right, later." it was set up by a democratic firm connected to the russian dossier. that t could be a set up. we dont even know that. jared and paul manafort did volunteer thist. contact. when they were asked about it, it was volunteered. i will tell you some other things, you know what else is more sketchy? hillary accepting and soliciting million dollar che...

Government. >> this is what investigators are -- >> im answering it. >> what is the answer? what is her connection to the kremlin? >> there was no connection. she was a private lawyer who had an interest with regard to the russian adoption program, and used a pretext to get a meet with the campaign which the campaign representatives almost immediately realized was not done in good faith. that she had another agenda. >> whats funny is that they wanted the original agenda. they wanted the dirt. >>...