THE FISH ROTS FROM THE LITTLE FINGER:

As Air Force One jetted back from Europe on Saturday, a small cadre of Mr. Trump's advisers huddled in a cabin helping to craft a statement for the president's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., to give to The New York Times explaining why he met last summer with a lawyer connected to the Russian government. Participants on the plane and back in the United States debated about how transparent to be in the statement, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Ultimately, the people said, the president signed off on a statement from Donald Trump Jr. for The Times that was so incomplete that it required day after day of follow-up statements, each more revealing than the last. It culminated on Tuesday with a release of emails making clear that Mr. Trump's son believed the Russian lawyer was seeking to meet with him to provide incriminating information about Hillary Clinton as "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." [...]

The emails, which the younger Mr. Trump released after learning that The Times had obtained copies and was about to publish them, undercut the president's line of defense in the Russia inquiry. For months, Mr. Trump has dismissed suspicions of collusion between Russia and his team as "fake news" and a "total hoax." His eldest son, likewise, had previously asserted that talk of collusion was "disgusting" and "so phony." Donald Trump Jr. said in a Fox News interview that he would have done things differently in retrospect, but he maintained he had done nothing improper.

At a minimum, however, the emails show that the younger Mr. Trump was not only willing, but also eager, to accept help advertised as coming from the Russian government. "I love it," he wrote.

While in Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant in November 2013, Donald Trump entered into a formal business deal with Aras Agalarov, a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin, to construct a Trump Tower in the Russian capital. He later assigned his son, Donald Trump Jr., to oversee the project, according to Rob Goldstone, the British publicist who arranged the controversial 2016 meeting between the younger Trump and a Kremlin-linked lawyer.

Trump has dismissed the idea he had any business deals in Russia, saying at one point last October, "I have nothing to do with Russia."

But Goldstone's account, provided in an extensive interview in March in New York, offers new details of the proposed Trump project that appears to have been further along than most previous reports have suggested, and even included a trip by Ivanka Trump to Moscow to identify potential sites.

According to the publicist, the project -- structured as a licensing deal in which Agalarov would build the tower with Trump's name on it -- was only abandoned after the Russian economy floundered. The economic downturn resulted in part from sanctions imposed by the U.S. and the European Union following Russia's intervention in Ukraine.

Goldstone's version of events implies a possible explanation for Trump's interest in lifting sanctions on Russia -- a policy move his administration quietly pursued in its first few weeks until it ran into strong opposition from members of Congress and officials within the State Department.

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