Will Donald junior’s conduct jolt Republicans?

THE first rule of modern conspiracies is that you do not talk about them in e-mails. It always seemed unlikely that, if Donald Trump’s associates had conspired with the Kremlin, they would have been amateurish enough to leave a paper trail. At least, it seemed that way until July 11th, when the president’s son, Donald junior, released astonishing messages he sent and received in advance of a meeting, in 2016, with a Russian lawyer. In the convoluted saga of the Trumps and the Russians, this may be the most explosive revelation yet.It is no good arguing, in the younger Mr Trump’s defence, that he gave the e-mails up himself: he knew the was about to publish them, because it had asked him for his side of the story. It scarcely helps to note that the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, says she does not work for the Kremlin. Her use of such a meeting to assail American sanctions, a neuralgic subject for Vladimir Putin, suggests that she was not simply a private citizen. Nor does it help that Donald junior says she did not, in the end, provide the dirt on Hillary Clinton he craved. Whoever she was, whatever the outcome, the intent to collude is plain. That vindicates what has always been the real charge: not that the Russians swayed the election, a claim that is impossible to verify, but that Mr Trump’s team overstepped the bounds of propriety, and maybe the law (see ).