No, that is exactly what Don Jr wanted to do when he met with the Russians at Trump tower. It's in the Mueller report. 
Originally Posted by adav8s28
You seem to be confused.
It is not a crime to smear a political opponent.
So did Don Jr. commit a crime or not and if he did why didn't Mueller charge him? If he didn't why bring it up at all?
It has always been my position that Don Jr. "technically" violated the law but Mueller found that he didn't intend to violate the law and would not be charged.
So yes, it is a crime to smear an opponent with information gained from a foreign source. Well, sometimes under certain conditions and depending on who the prosecutor is. Isn't the law grand?
I knew damn well Hillary violated the law and a blind, deaf and dumb person could figure out there was intent when a private server was set up, bleach bit used to hid evidence and e-mails hidden from investigators but Comey says he found no such intent even though he testified before Congress that she lied on at least 6 different occasions and then turned around and said she never lied "to me".
So, for those not paying attention, here is my ump-tenth time explaining this issue.
https://www.vox.com/2019/6/14/186776...ec-illegal-fbi
“I would not have thought I needed to say this,” Federal Election Commission head Ellen Weintraub tweeted regarding a statement she’d issued outlining why it’s illegal for US political candidates to accept contributions from foreign governments.
Weintraub tried to clarify: “Let me make something 100% clear to the American public and anyone running for public office: It is illegal for any person to solicit, accept, or receive anything of value from a foreign national in connection with a U.S. election.”
“This is not a novel concept,” she wrote. “Election intervention from foreign governments has been considered unacceptable since the founding of our nation.”
The US has laws that govern how political campaigns can and cannot operate. Many of these laws are meant to limit or in some cases just illuminate the amount of outside money that is trying to influence political candidates.
And when it comes to foreign influence, the law is clear: As Weintraub wrote, it is “illegal for any person to solicit, accept, or receive anything of value from a foreign national in connection with a U.S. election.”
In most cases, what this means is pretty obvious: Foreign nationals can’t donate money to a presidential campaign. It’s also illegal for candidates themselves to solicit or receive monetary contributions from foreign nationals.
But while a “thing of value” is easy to define when it comes to money, or even services or in-kind contributions, it’s a lot more complicated when it comes to something like opposition research, or so-called campaign dirt.
“Campaign-relevant information from a foreign national definitely can be an illegal in-kind contribution, but it gets trickier when the information does not have obvious cash value and isn’t necessarily something that a campaign regularly needs to buy,” Michael Kang, a law professor at Northwestern University, told me in an email. “The policy concern is that any valuable advice or tip from a foreign national could, at least in theory, become an illegal in-kind contribution.”
Special counsel Robert Mueller grappled with this question as part of his investigation of the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting in which Donald Trump Jr. and other members of the Trump campaign met with a Russian national who’d promised to give them “dirt” on Hillary Clinton as part of Moscow’s effort to support Trump’s candidacy.
Mueller concluded in his report that “candidate-related opposition research given to a campaign for the purpose of influencing an election could constitute a contribution to which the foreign-source ban could apply,” but added that the issue hadn’t really been testedin court and could also have freedom of speech implications.
Ultimately, Mueller declined to prosecute Trump Jr. because he said he could not prove that the president’s son “knowingly” or “willfully” broke the law, and because it was extremely difficult to assess how much the opposition research would have been valued.
That statute that governs these campaign finance law requires a threshold of at least $2,000 for a misdemeanor and more than $25,000 for a felony. Those attending the Trump Tower meetings testified that they didn’t receive any dirt, so Mueller concluded that it would be very difficult to assess the value of the information, making it hard to prove a campaign finance violation beyond a reasonable doubt.
“Mueller most certainly did not say that accepting opposition research from a foreign government is very legal and very cool,” Vox’s Andrew Prokop explains. “He did, however, choose not to bring charges in this particular instance, for reasons relating to the specifics of the evidence and the situation.”
Experts are split on Mueller’s conclusion on Trump Jr. But experts I spoke to also pointed out that Mueller’s decision was about whether Trump Jr. should be criminally charged — and doesn’t address the question of whether he could be subject to civil penalties from the FEC, which has a much lower threshold. (For example, Common Cause, a good-government watchdog group, has filed complaints with the FEC and the Justice Department on the Trump Tower meeting.)
And while the value of opposition research might be hard to gauge, experts said it’s difficult to argue that it doesn’t have some worth, as campaigns regularly pay for it. Jessica Levinson, a law professor at Loyola Law School, told me that practical considerations would suggest that, yes, campaign dirt does have value.
“There’s a reason campaigns pay for opposition research: We literally value it,” Levinson said. “It can be much more useful and valuable than walking in with a check.”
Now if you want to read about Hillary's paying a foreign national for dirt, that is covered too in the article but that is separate and apart from Hillary setting up a private server to conceal what she was doing against federal guidelines and then tried to destroy those e-mails so that she wouldn't get caught, which she did, but with Comey at the helm of the investigation, it didn't matter
