At this point, those who seize uncritically upon every new Trump-Russia scandal are like the Safeway shoppers who kept scooping up every George-W.-Bush-is-drinking-again issue of Globe (meaning, for a while, pretty much every issue of Globe). That the publications this time around are more varied, and respectable, doesn’t mean that the noise-to-evidence ratio isn’t absurdly high.

I was therefore initially prepared to watch the latest set of revelations on the matter, namely a New York Times report that Donald Trump Jr. had met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in a fruitless effort to get some dirt on Hillary Clinton, lose some of their shine. As the pro-Trump columnist Michael Walsh put it in the New York Post, “No campaign in its right mind would turn down an offer of information on their opponent. That is what opposition research is all about.”

And it’s true that if you want dirt about Russia and your rival, you probably have to talk to Russians. Trump’s political rivals sought out plenty of sketchy Russians in order to get information on Trump, employing Christopher Steele to find and talk to them. Furthermore, appearing on multiple occasions in the Times account is the phrase “linked to,” which is one of the trustiest ways to connect two parties no matter how many degrees of separation there might be between them. (As a young man, I once met Jack Kemp, and as an adult in China I met several members of the People’s Liberation Army. Presto: Jack Kemp has now been linked to the People’s Liberation Army.)

But this story isn’t as trivial as Trump’s defenders seem to think, or want to think. Donald Trump Jr. changed his statement on the meeting after more was discovered—now to include the part about Clinton—revealing at least a sin of omission. More important, he is claiming to have taken a meeting with a Russian whose identity he didn’t even know. His history of inconsistent statements became more knotted late Monday night when the Times further reported that the president’s son had been informed via e-mail that the dirt on Clinton was part of a Russian government effort to boost his father’s campaign.

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On what planet does a high-ranking executive take a meeting with anyone without getting some information on that person, let alone without getting the person’s name? How did Veselnitskaya even get in the door? As The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza points out, this meeting occurred at Trump Tower during a time when Donald Trump had already acquired Secret Service protection. As it turns out, this lawyer had state-owned companies as clients and numerous connections to the Russian government and possibly also organized crime. In short, this is the sort of person you should meet only if you know what you’re doing, probably not even then, and not without alerting the F.B.I.