Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and the Trump presidency in 2017.

I'm Freddie Gray and I'm Deputy Editor of the Spectator. I'm joined today again by Jacob Halbrun, who is editor of the national interest and a regular contributor to the Americano podcast.

And we're going to be talking about the latest twist in the Trump-Russia saga.

Jacob, NBC News is reporting that Donald Trump Jr. somehow forgot to mention that a former Soviet counterintelligence officer was also present at, as you put it,

his powwow in June 2017 with the Russian lawyer, Natalia Wilya Wilyensjankar.

Earlier in the week, you wrote a blog for us saying that these Donald Trump Jr.

revelations were finally the smoking gun that Trump's critics were looking for, and a few others,

myself included,

thought that perhaps the evidence wasn't quite as damning as you thought. This appears to show that you were more right than I was. Well, you could still construct, I mean, you could construct

a defense of your view still. You could say that it's unclear what the import of his being there was

and so forth. But I do think it points to the drip, drip nature of this. My own view had been that,

you know, given his Russia ties, that Trump probably was engaging in

some kind of money laundering over the past decades or that the Russians bailed him out

financially when he went bust. I wasn't convinced that there was actual collusion.

And this meeting shows that there were, or this meeting suggests that there was intent for collusion.

It doesn't actually show that it occurred.

But what worries me about all of this is it has the feeling of previous scandals where it just

gets worse and worse all the time.

And you can artfully construct defenses of Trump.

And some people on Fox News try to do that.

But others, as I wrote in the piece for you, such as Charles Krauthammer, who said all along he'd been very dubious that there was any collusion, that there were just a lot of coincidences that didn't necessarily amount to anything.

He said, well, now, no, we now know that the Trump campaign was consistently lying about an absence of contacts with Russians.

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