what was said

“And I think I can speak for the people in this room that would have said, ‘Oh, gee, information on my opponent and it’s bad information?’ Name me a politician that would have turned that down. There is no such thing as that kind of a politician.”

— President Trump, in an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday

the facts

This is misleading.

Defending the meeting his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., took with a Kremlin-linked lawyer in summer 2016, Mr. Trump insisted that the meeting was common practice. But as The New York Times’s Jonathan Martin has reported, “while opposition research is part of modern presidential campaigns, it normally does not come from representatives of a hostile foreign power.”

Alan Huffman, freelance writer and political opposition researcher of more than two decades, said that he had “never been in a situation where damaging information was offered by a foreign source.”

Though there are politicians who have accepted foreign aid, Mr. Trump is wrong to suggest that no other candidate has turned down opposition research from a foreign entity.

In 1960, the Soviet ambassador to the United States offered to assist Adlai E. Stevenson, a Democrat, in his potential presidential campaign. Mr. Stevenson said he was not running but, even if he did, he could not accept the offer, according to a memo he wrote.