New story at Vox:
As recently as Monday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer bizarrely stuck toDonald Trump Jr.’s self-debunked excuse for his 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer and a former Soviet spy: that the meeting was “primarily” about adoption. He hewed to that line even though Trump’s meeting partners had expressly promised to deliver compromising information about Hillary Clinton.
On Wednesday, President Trump suggested that the topic of his unreported second meeting with Vladimir Putin at a G20 dinner was also adoption.
The notion of adoption being used as a cover for dirty politics has become an absurdist punchline, but the issue of US adoptions from Russia has, in fact, long been an intensely political one.