Donald Trump Jr. Had No ‘Mental Capacity’ To Understand Crime, Mueller May Have Found, Says Ex-CIA Official

One of the major mysteries left hanging by the Mueller report — Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 400-page summary of his 22-month investigation set to be released on Thursday, CNBC reported — is why Donald Trump’s eldest son, 41-year-old Donald Trump Jr., was not indicted by Mueller.

As The Inquisitr reported, experts say that the meeting with a delegation of Russians in Trump Tower on June 9, 2016 — a meeting at which Trump Jr. was told he would receive information held by the Russian government that would “incriminate” Democrat Hillary Clinton — could easily have been viewed as criminal, due to laws against accepting anything of value from a foreign government in the course of an election campaign.

“It sure looked like at least Trump Jr. and perhaps others at that meeting committed a crime,” wrote law professor Richard Hasen in a Slate essay. The meeting was also attended by the elder Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump’s then-campaign chair Paul Manafort.

Manafort has since been sentenced to about seven-and-a-half-years in prison for various financial crimes that were uncovered by Mueller in the course of his investigation, as CNN reported. Manafort’s crimes were linked to his work in Ukraine for the Russian-backed President Viktor Yanukovich, for whom Manafort acted as a top political adviser.

So why did Mueller let Trump Jr. get away without facing a criminal indictment for his role in the suspicious meeting with Russians in Trump Tower at the height of the 2016 presidential election campaign? The answers may come in the release of the Mueller report in what is now expected to be only a “lightly redacted” version on Thursday morning, according to The Washington Post. The report, by law, must explain Mueller’s decisions on why he indicted or declined to indict individuals targeted by the investigation.

According to former CIA and Pentagon top official Jeremey Bash, interviewed Thursday afternoon by MSNBC host Nicole Wallace, Mueller may have simply believed that Trump Jr. was not smart enough to understand that the Trump Tower meeting was potentially a crime, as Raw Story reported.

“Whether the special counsel concluded at the end of the day that someone like Don, Jr. didn’t have the mental capacity — and I use that term specifically — because he didn’t have the intent, because he didn’t understand politics, whatever the basis for saying a crime wasn’t committed is important to know,” Bash said on the program.

Watch the interview with Bash on MSNBC Thursday in the video below.

The Mueller report is expected to go to Congress at 11 a.m. Eastern Time on Thursday morning, and will like be posted online to be made available to the public shortly thereafter. Rather than email the report to Congress, however, the report will be delivered by hand, burned onto a CD-ROM, according to The Associated Press.