IF PINNOCCHIO HAD NO JIMINY CRICKET:

When the New York Times initially reported the story of Donald Trump having a second unplanned meeting on July 7th with Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit, they also reported that the next day, on the return trip on Air Force One, a statement was drafted for Donald Trump Jr. so he could respond to questions about an undisclosed meeting he had organized between himself, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and a Russian lawyer.

Here's how that early reporting looked:

The evening after his two meetings with Mr. Putin -- the first lasting 135 minutes and the second an hour -- Mr. Trump returned to Washington. On the Air Force One flight back, his top advisers helped draft a statement about a meeting his son Donald Trump Jr. attended last year with a Kremlin-connected lawyer who promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

The statement said that the meeting was primarily about the Russian ban on Americans adopting Russian orphans. Sometime later, on July 19th, the president explained in an interview with the New York Times what he had talked about with Putin during his unscheduled meeting at the G20 dinner.

"We talked about Russian adoption. Yeah. I always found that interesting. Because, you know, he ended that years ago. And I actually talked about Russian adoption with him, which is interesting because it was a part of the conversation that Don [Jr., Mr. Trump's son] had in that meeting."

In this time period, Trump and his lawyers and surrogates denied that Donald Trump had been aware that the story about Donald Jr. was coming and only learned about it when everyone else did after the story broke in the New York Times. They also denied (necessarily) that Trump had any role in crafting the statement on Air Force One.

There turned out to be quite a few problems with this story.

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