When The New York Times first reported on the existence of the 2016 Trump Tower meeting, in July of last year, Trump Jr. issued a statement insisting it had been focused only on Russian adoptions. Faced with emails that showed Trump Jr. had been told to expect dirt on Clinton, he was forced to concede that that was not true.

The president scrambled to adjust. On July 13, during a press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron, he said, “I think from a practical standpoint, most people would have taken that meeting. It’s called opposition research, or even research into your opponent.” Four days later, he tweeted, “Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That’s politics!”

Sunday’s tweet is the most direct statement yet that the purpose of the June 2016 meeting was to get damaging information from Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer who has deep ties to the Kremlin. Trump Jr. had also been told in an email ahead of the meeting that the government of President Vladimir Putin supported his father’s candidacy. But declaring the meeting legal does not make it so. Over the last week, the president and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani have focused on the claim that “collusion” with the Russians, or anyone else, is not a crime per se.

In debating whether collusion is a crime, Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani are successfully changing the narrative

That may be true, but as Bob Bauer explains in Lawfare, accepting anything of value from Russians could easily fall afoul of laws that ban accepting electoral assistance from foreign nationals. Trump Jr. and Veselnitskaya have both insisted that there was no actual “dirt” exchanged, but the president has tweeted out an apparent admission that his son intended to break campaign-finance laws.

Sunday’s tweet connects with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump obstructed justice, too. Roughly three weeks after the Times initially revealed the June 2016 meeting, the Post reported that the president had dictated his son’s initial, false denial while flying home from Europe on Air Force One. That lie has created a cascading series of problems. At the time, the Trump attorney Jay Sekulow denied that Trump had any role in the statement. Speaking Sunday on ABC’s This Week, he acknowledged that that was not true. “I had bad information at that time and made a mistake in my statement,” Sekulow said. His flip-flop raises further questions about whether he intended to misdirect investigators.

More broadly, the president’s repeated dishonesty about the June 2016 meeting undermines the credibility of every statement he makes about the meeting. Although the president and his son—the latter under penalty of perjury—have both said that Trump Sr. only learned of the June 2016 meeting last year, Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen last week claimed that the president was aware of the meeting before it happened. Why should anyone give Trump the benefit of the doubt now?