This morning on Morning Joe, everyone was appalled at the meeting Donald Trump Jr. took with what he thought was a representative of the Russian government.
Scarborough made the point that this is now a national security question, and gives Republicans political cover to challenge the administration.
"Don Jr. went into that meeting, let's strip it down. He went into that meeting expecting help from the Russian government. Stop. Full stop."
"That's why the lawyer's statement, the attorney's statement is so misleading," Katy Kay said.
"Because all it says is, people said they had information. Take out people and say 'the Kremlin said it had information' because that's really what we're talking about, that's what Don Jr. understood clearly going into that meeting that they were talking about.
"You talked about the financial side of this and that's what Bob Mueller is going to be looking at. I was wondering about Don Jr. and he knew it was the Russian government, aren't we just no longer looking at at financial dealings? Because it seems to me, this is quantifiably different."
"Absolutely," said former FBI agent Clint Watts.
"You tend to build a baseline with all the hard data before you start going into your interviews. What's going to happen when they go into the interviews is, well, what was this transaction, what was this contact, what was this meeting about.
"What it's ultimately going to come to is, Americans need to understand: when a Russian attorney, a Russian oligarch or a person shows up at your door, they're acting as an asset of the Russia state. This isn't the United States.
"I'm tired of the hearing this from the Trump team saying, oh, we're just new at this, we didn't know. Well, If you're so new at this, maybe you shouldn't be leading our country. Because this is Espionage 101."
"Manafort was in the meetings," Scarborough interjected.
"Manafort knows it better than anyone, for a lot of different reasons," Watts said.
