Dan McLaughlin of National Review Online criticizes partisans on the left and right for their response to the Donald Trump Jr. scandal.
Don Jr. was wrong to take that meeting, full stop. It is a real scandal that he did so, period. No amount of comparison to other misconduct by anybody else mitigates that, no amount of amateurism on his part excuses it (if anything, this illustrates the problem with having a presidential campaign full of people of low character and no political experience). Conservatives defending Don Jr., or Paul Manafort, or Jared Kushner (both of whom were told about the meeting and forwarded the email chain at the time) should be embarrassed. The fact that this looks like as much a Russian sting on Don Jr. as a legitimate attempt to help him shouldn’t change our view that the whole affair illustrates why Putin’s regime is malicious and a malignant influence on the politics of the U.S. and other democratic nations. …
… But just because Don Jr. was wrong, doesn’t necessarily make what he did illegal. The word “treason” has been thrown around very loosely, even by Senator Tim Kaine, Hillary’s erstwhile running mate. Former Obama advisor Ben Rhodes, whose misadventures understanding the law I’ve discussed before, asked on Twitter, “I’m old enough to remember when the GOP was outraged over legalisms like the definition of is. What about the definition of treason?”
In fact, the definition of treason is anything but a technicality. Among the scores of federal crimes on the books, it’s the only crime explicitly defined in the Constitution, in Article III, Section 3, and the Founding Fathers considered that strict written definition to be an essential bulwark against political prosecutions of precisely the type that Kaine, Rhodes, and others are so flippantly suggesting.
