Old Habits: Skittish Republicans Quick to Jump on Trump Jr. Flap

Several of the usual GOP Establishment suspects lined up Tuesday to distance themselves from the Republican in the White House and to pan Donald Trump Jr. after revelations the president’s son met with a Russian lawyer in June 2016.

“Okay, so any time you’re in a campaign and you get a offer from a foreign government to help your campaign, the answer is no,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “I don’t know what Mr. Trump Jr.’s version of the facts are. Definitely he has to testify. That email is disturbing,” Graham said.

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“But what is equally odd is that the person they met with knew absolutely nothing,” Graham continued. “I don’t know why they would pick somebody for him to meet with who didn’t have information about the Clinton campaign, but on its face, this is very problematic.”

Graham, whose anti-Trump commentary has somewhat ebbed as the president has become more hawkish on the foreign-policy front, was joined in his criticism by more fundamentalist NeverTrump Republicans.

“If this story is true, we’d have one of them if not both of them in custody by now, and we’d be asking them a lot of questions,” Richard Painter, a former ethics lawyer for George W. Bush, said Sunday on MSNBC. “This is unacceptable. This borders on treason, if it is not itself treason.”

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Painter failed to note a January 2017 report in Politico that outlined in detail Ukrainian coordination with the Democratic National Committee to produce damaging information on Trump.

On Monday, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) told reporters that “our intelligence committee needs to interview [Trump Jr.] and others who attended the meeting” as part of the intelligence committee’s probe into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), usually a reliable critic of Trump, was more tempered in his response to the media frenzy.

“I don’t know [if the meeting was collusion] because I don’t know enough about it,” McCain told reporters on Monday.