According to the Times, Trump even told some aides, “I think this is getting better.” The president appears to believe that Trump Jr. has cleared the air by putting out the email chain and defending himself on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News, which Trump hailed as “transparent.”

If Trump truly believes he has turned a corner, he is either overly confident in his ability to evade culpability or (and these two things aren’t mutually exclusive) he is delusional.

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The Russia probe is not getting better for Trump. It’s just getting started. And Trump Jr.’s supposed transparency notwithstanding, if the behavior of Trump’s closest aides and confidants tells us anything, it’s not anything remotely like the case is closed. Instead, that behavior highlights the many lines of inquiry investigators are likely now pursuing.

Some of the people closest to Trump, including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and Vice President Pence have done things in recent days that will only pique the interest of investigators, not diminish it.

To summarize: Since the New York Times first broke the story of the June 9, 2016, meeting — which included Trump Jr., Kushner, and then-campaign chair Paul Manafort — three people very close to Trump have either admitted they failed to be fully transparent about their meetings with foreign entities during the campaign or were, in fact, not transparent about whether they had such meetings.

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Let’s review: On Tuesday, the Times reported that at some point in the past few weeks — it’s not clear precisely when— Kushner’s legal team became aware, while reviewing documents, that he was present at the June 9, 2016, meeting with the Russian lawyer in Trump Tower. After Kushner’s lawyers discovered this, they amended his application for a security clearance to include it. All of this came before we learned of the meeting.

Then, when the news of the meeting broke, leading to questions about why Kushner had originally failed to include it on the security clearance application, Kushner’s lawyer issued a statement saying that Kushner had “prematurely” submitted an application that “did not list any contacts with foreign government officials.” Kushner’s lawyer clarified that he has since amended it to include this information, as well as a lot more. The amended application noted that during the campaign and transition, “he had over 100 calls or meetings with representatives of more than 20 countries, most of which were during transition,” and included the meeting with the Russian lawyer.

The security clearance form — SF-86 — is not at all vague in its requirement to disclose meetings with foreign government entities. The question on the form reads: “Have you or any member of your immediate family in the past seven (7) years, had any contact with a foreign government, its establishment (such as embassy, consulate, agency, military service, intelligence or security service, etc.) or its representatives, whether inside or outside the U.S.?”

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Kushner attorney Jamie Gorelick’s statement concedes that Kushner initially listed no such meetings and only later amended his answer to include more than 100.

Now, Sessions. Back on Jan. 10, during his confirmation hearings, he testified that he “did not have any communications with the Russians” during the campaign. But then, on March 1, The Post reported that Sessions did in fact meet with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak on two occasions during the campaign. The next day, Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation.

And yet, as NPR reported this morning, Sessions had also said on his SF-86 that he had no such meetings. We now know this only because Sessions released just one page from his SF-86, and only under court order, after being sued in a Freedom of Information Act case by American Oversight, a government watchdog group. (American Oversight’s request, and ensuing lawsuit, were triggered by Sessions’s testimony in which he said he had never met with the Russians.)

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But Sessions has not amended his SF-86, if the excerpt he filed in court is still current. And he’s the top law enforcement official in the United States. We know he met, at a minimum, with Kislyak on two occasions, after saying he hadn’t. Yet his form still says he met with no foreign government representatives.

Now on to Pence. He has given less-than-definitive answers about whether he had any contacts with foreign governments during the campaign. After Trump Jr. released the email chain on Tuesday, Pence quickly pointed out through a spokesman that the June 9, 2016, meeting with Veselnitskaya took place before he joined the campaign, thus distancing himself from it.

Yet when asked on Fox News yesterday about whether Pence himself had met with any “representatives from Russia” or “representatives of the Russian government” after he joined the campaign, Pence’s spokesman dodged the question. When pressed, the spokesman said he was “not aware” of any such meetings. Note the phrasing, which leaves open the possibility that there could have been meetings that he was not aware of.

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And on top of all this, there is Trump himself, who has also been far from transparent — which may soon come back to haunt him. As Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a member of the Judiciary Committee, hinted today, investigators may well subpoena the president’s tax returns, which he has long refused to release. “There is credible information to suggest that the tax returns would reveal contacts with Russia,” said Whitehouse. “He is exactly the model of the business mark the Russians target in their election interference strategies.” In other words, Trump himself, because of his business dealings, was the kind of person Russian intelligence would recruit to assist them — and his tax returns would provide clues about whether that happened.