Appearing on Fox and Friends, Donald Trump Jr. seemed to be taking a page from his father’s playbook when he decided to open his big dumb mouth on live television and discuss potential crimes that may have been committed by himself or people that he knows, all the way back to 2006.
If that seems like a silly thing for Don to do, remember that this is the guy who thinks he’s enough of a sex symbol to post his sweaty workout selfies on Instagram, so he doesn’t actually have a whole lot of self-awareness when it comes to what’s appropriate to say or do out loud.
Asked by the hosts of the President’s favorite show what he thought about investigations happening in the Southern District of New York — a decidedly different venue than the DOJ-restricted arena that Bob Mueller worked in — Junior was defiant:
I’m old enough to remember two weeks ago when Mueller was gonna be the savior. But that’s what they’re trying to do. They’re not investigating actual crimes anymore. They’re literally just trying to find something that they can make a big deal of.”
That’s all boilerplate, though — he’s not just echoing his father’s “witch hunt” rhetoric, his voice is actually now starting to sound like his father’s.
It was when Donnie couldn’t stop riffing, couldn’t quite reel himself in, that he started running at the mouth and saying things he’ll probably regret when his lawyer calls him this afternoon:
What they did was, they put incredible pressure on regular guys that couldn’t afford [a] million dollars in legal fees, and got them to slip up and say something incorrectly.”
Now, that’s not much of a legal defense, and we’re fairly certain that socked away somewhere among the millions and millions and millions of dollars that Paul Manafort earned as an illegally-acting foreign agent of Russia and Ukraine, he had enough for his legal fees. But Junior still wasn’t done:
There are no actual crimes, there’s only things that people did in past lives, you know, in 2006, before we thought we’d even get into this crazy world.”
So you’re saying investigators should look back to 2006, Don? What happened that year?
The fact is, there are current crimes. Cohen’s admitted lying to the FBI on Trump’s behalf happened in 2017. The witness tampering that Manafort engaged in with Konstantin Kilimnik took place in late 2018. But the nonchalant callback to 2006 is perfectly indicative of exactly what Trump and his family think is wrong with this entire investigation — it’s why he won’t release his taxes, it’s why Trump requires non-disclosure agreements… The fact is, Donald Trump and his family think that anything that’s in the past should stay in the past and never be spoken about again.
Watch the Fox and Friends segment here:
Featured image via screen capture
