Find me a media commentator who isn’t turning him or herself upside down trying to explain why Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with the Russians could potentially lead to the president’s removal from office, and I’ll show you someone who either isn’t on the air or is just not trying very hard.

Nobody seemed to care when the Russians used political influence to buy up U.S. uranium stocks under Obama. Let’s see if they care the Chinese may now be trying to buy up significant quantities of U.S. copper using a criminally-convicted former Clinton associate as a front to do it. It’s the allegation foreign influence tipped the balance in 2016 presidential election that’s the story that keeps going and growing because the Trump haters think it might eventually lead to something that pushes him out of office.

The president is right when he says most anyone would have taken the meeting his son took – though maybe not at that senior a level. Campaigns are rough and tumble. Good operatives are always on the lookout for information that could be damaging to an opponent and – contrary to what some folks are saying as they peek out from under the halos that have suddenly appeared above their heads – that’s not always stuff that comes from publicly available sources. Barack Obama got to the U.S. Senate because he got a couple of news organizations to convince an Illinois judge to unseal divorce records that both parties to the divorce agreed would be closed to public view.

That’s not the worst of it. What really stinks is the way any contact with the Russians that anyone on the Trump campaign may have had is now center-stage in U.S. politics, while just three presidents ago we had clear and convincing evidence that campaign contributions coming from foreign sources – in clear violation of U.S. campaign finance laws then, now, and always – were helping a U.S. chief executive get re-elected.

Editorial Cartoons on Democrats in the Trump Era View All 58 Images

It’s not a surprise the millennials who populate the punditocracy aren’t writing about this. They were still in grade school or maybe even diapers when it all happened. Nonetheless, they might find it useful to “Bing” names like John Huang, Charlie Trie and James Riady to see what foreign influence in U.S. elections really looks like. Or, even easier, they can just read the synopsis of events as recounted here by John Fund for National Review Online.

As Fund explains, the Asian-based effort to influence Bill Clinton’s re-election fundraising eventually “led to 22 guilty pleas on various violations of election laws. Among the Clinton fundraisers and friends who pleaded guilty were John Huang, Charlie Trie, James Riady, and Michael Brown, son of the late Clinton Commerce secretary Ron Brown.” Yet the whole time the media said “ho hum” to the whole business – which had more international implications than anything Bill Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky – just like they're saying “hum ho” to the allegations Hillary Clinton’s campaign worked with the Ukrainians to dig up damaging information about one-time Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and other Trump associates.

Some of the folks who helped Bill Clinton raise cash back in 1996 are still up to no good. According to WikiLeaks, James Riady, now the head of The Lippo Group continued to help the Clintons post-presidency by making contributions to the Clinton Global Initiative. Now, as has appeared elsewhere on the web and been confirmed independently, he’s trying on behalf of Lippo China Resources – a Hong Kong-based entity controlled by the Riady family - to purchase a Utah copper mine located on 60,000 acres owned by the U.S. government.

Riady, who was banned from the United States in 2001, has documented links to Chinese intelligence services. If the deal he’s trying to consummate goes through it would constitute nothing less than a foreign occupation of a vital American resource, in this case a minimum of 1.5 billion pounds of copper according to surveys of the vast deposits he’s eyeing. It may be even bigger.

Some will argue one thing has nothing to do with the other. Control of U.S. resources essential to America’s national security by foreign powers, like the uranium sold to the Russians as facilitated by Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state, ought to be a big issue no matter what administration allows it. It’s certainly a bigger deal, as is Riady’s attempt to acquire such vast copper reserves on behalf of himself and Chinese interests, than whether the president or his sons benefit personally because some wealthy Arabs stayed at the Washington hotel bearing their name.

To put it another way, it is a crime to exceed the posted speed limit. There is, however, a big difference between going 75 on the interstate when the limit is 55 and going 50 miles per hour through a school zone at recess. Taking laundered campaign contributions that likely originated with officials of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army is much more the latter than the former, while taking a meeting with a Russian lawyer seems much more benign – even if there was an ex-intelligence operative in the room.