Two days ago, the New York Times broke a story about a meeting that took place at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016 between senior members of the Trump campaign, including Donald Trump Jr., and a Russian attorney with known ties to the Kremlin. When asked to comment on what was discussed at this previously undisclosed meeting, Donald Trump Jr. told the Times that it “was a short introductory meeting” about “a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government.”

Well, guess what? It now appears as though Trump’s eldest son, his son-in-law, and his campaign manager, didn’t just attend the meeting because of their concern over the plight of Russia’s orphans. No, this morning, Donald Trump Jr. confirmed that they’d attended the meeting because they’d been promised damaging information on Hillary Clinton. The following comes by way of today’s New York Times.

President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign, according to three advisers to the White House briefed on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it.

The meeting was also attended by his campaign chairman at the time, Paul J. Manafort, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kushner only recently disclosed the meeting, though not its content, in confidential government documents described to The New York Times.

The Times reported the existence of the meeting on Saturday. But in subsequent interviews, the advisers and others revealed the motivation behind it.

The meeting — at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, two weeks after Donald J. Trump clinched the Republican nomination — points to the central question in federal investigations of the Kremlin’s meddling in the presidential election: whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians. The accounts of the meeting represent the first public indication that at least some in the campaign were willing to accept Russian help…

And here’s Donald Trump Jr.’s written statement to the Times… Pay particular attention to the part where he says, “the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting.”

So, we now have – for the first time – an admission on the part of a senior Trump campaign official that they had actively sought out information from agents of a hostile foreign nation about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton… an admission that our President can’t just brush off as “fake news.”

The Russian attorney they met with, by the way – Natalia Veselnitskaya – is, to quote the New York Times, “a formidable operator with a history of pushing the Kremlin’s agenda.” According to intelligence community sources, Veselnitskaya is most known for her efforts to role back a piece of legislation signed into law in 2012 by President Obama called the Magnitsky Act, which allowed our government to seize the U.S. assets of 44 Russian citizens thought to be involved in fraud and organized crime, and deny them entry into our country. [Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian lawyer for whom the legislation was named, was founded murdered in the Russian jail he was sentenced to after coming forward as a whistleblower, making public the corruption of Putin’s government.]

Well, as you might imagine, a number of people are suggesting that this, in and of itself, constitutes treason. And it’s not just people on the far left broaching the subject. Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush from ’05 to ’07, said very bluntly on Twitter today, “This is treason.” Adding, “He must have known that the only way Russia would get such information was by spying,” Painter went on to say, “In the Bush Administration we would have had him in custody for questioning by now.”

As far as I can tell, though, Donald Trump Jr. has yet to be taken into custody… The White House, however, has been in full crisis mode, attempting to downplay the significance of the admission and distance the President. Mark Corallo, the spokesperson for the President’s lawyer, said today that “the President was not aware of, and did not attend, the meeting.” [Given that Trump was in New York with Manafort on June 9, one would imagine, at the very least, he was aware.] And White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus today suggested, in the words of Fox News, that the whole thing was “part of a large political smear campaign orchestrated by a group that pushed out the largely discredited ‘Steele dossier.’” That’s right, he’s suggesting that forces aligned with Hillary Clinton lured the senior members of the Trump campaign into a meeting with a Russian operative under the presence of getting their hands on illegally obtained intelligence, only to then turn around and burn them with it six months after the election, when it would do them absolutely no good.

Now, we just need to look at the timeline and see when it was that Kushner approached the Kislyak and company and asked whether or not they could establish a secure communications backchannel so that members of the campaign could talk directly with the Kremlin outside of existing State Department channels.