Mr. Trump Jr. should have known better, and realized that opposition research and muckraking is best left to the professionals. That way the candidate, or his immediate family, does not get his own hands dirty. You or I or anybody we know would not have engaged in a meeting to learn dirt about a political opponent, but we can be pretty sure that there are dozens of operatives in both parties who would have done so with little hesitation. (It is amusing and quaint to hear the hard-bitten veterans of many a campaign publicly declaim that they would never, never do any such thing.) Dirty tricks have been around for some time, and eleven-year old hot mike remarks by a future presidential candidate don’t harvest themselves.
There were some other less than savory personalities in the meeting with Donald Trump Jr., but that’s a bit beyond our present scope. The significant thing is that “campaign ethics” should not be a contradiction in terms, and we should not stoop to dishing dirt or pushing it to tame sources for dissemination. We should also not be unreservedly inclined to believe all the dirt we do hear about candidates, or Presidents. But the beauty of this type of escapade is that no actual harm need have resulted, its mere existence is enough to destroy. The Trump administration is busy explaining, justifying, excusing or apologizing for something that, at worse, had the potential for being unethical. We do not believe that it was the only such event in the 2016 campaign – heck, it wasn’t even the only one involving Fusion GPS - but one wouldn’t know it by watching the news.
This all may be enough to hang Donald Trump Jr. out to dry, and it might even be deserved; but let’s not pretend that no other unscrupulous act took place involving the Russians or Fusion GPS or the 2016 campaign. A full investigation is needed and it can’t be full without investigating the Hillary Clinton, Jill Stein and Gary Johnson campaigns along with the Donald Trump campaign.