Ambrose: Trump Jr.’s Russian meeting was bad judgment, not treason

For instance, some have said information has monetary value, too, because it took resources to come up with. Not only is this contrary to free speech protections, as has been pointed out, but it makes you fear for our system because it’s a way of redefining a law to mean anything that benefits your cause of the moment.

I might add that if the Russians had actually had the goods on Clinton, it would have been conceivable they picked it up just hanging around a bar one night. I once knew a political reporter who came up with incredible stories that way.

As for treason, the definition is the high crime of assassination, a coup, or taking up arms with an enemy in order to betray what resides from sea to shining sea. This wasn’t close, and you wonder if the people bringing it up would call it murder if they saw someone punched in the nose. What’s more, please explain to me how much worse the Trump Jr. episode was than news outlets blasting WikiLeaks stories all over the country and playing happy games with U.S. officials feloniously releasing classified information that just could threaten national security.

From early on, the WikiLeaks stories were said to come from Russia and, if one was juicy enough, even news outlets with liberal biases would give it the kind of exposure without which it would have meant nothing.

Something is amiss

I am not against this as long as the information had been verified because the public can thus be served. I am a lot more hesitant on classified information because, even though it may have been classified for political reasons, it may also have been classified to save lives and avoid disruption of legitimate national goals.

The thunderstorm of governmental leaks about Trump points to something dramatically amiss. We do not want our own government doing its illegal best to oust a president anymore than we want Russians hacking computers.

There have, of course, been all kinds of Democratic scandals worse than this one, such as the Clintons making lots of dough helping the Russians become the world’s foremost uranium power. Or Bill Clinton having a secret meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch while his wife was being investigated. Or Hillary Clinton’s team destroying subpoenaed emails.

It’s still the case that two wrongs don’t make a right and that Trump Jr. initially misled the public about what went on with the Russians. As a Wall Street Journal editorial wisely says, President Donald Trump and friends would be better off being wide open about everything than letting others disclose the facts for them. In that direction lies disaster in which the left takes troubling power even if the Trump Jr. incident by itself should produce no such outcome.