I missed this the other day: the White House eventually admitted that Trump was the source of the first statement on Junior’s meeting with the Rooshians.

The White House has confirmed Donald Trump played a role in drafting a misleading statement about his son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer.

On Tuesday, the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, contradicted Trump’s attorney, Jay Sekulow, who said the president had had no involvement.

“The statement that Don Jr issued is true,” Huckabee Sanders said at the daily press briefing. “There is no inaccuracy in the statement. The president weighed in as any father would.”

Oh sure, any father who had financial and perhaps even more sinister ties with Russia would issue a lying public statement about his son’s involvement, because that’s what daddies do.

Also, of course, the statement Junior issued was not true, and there was inaccuracy in the statement. Huckabee Sanders is lying for the boss again, as any decent Christian fanatic would.

The statement, which was issued by Donald Trump Jr’s lawyer, required repeated updates as more details of the meeting leaked out.

Initially, Trump Jr said he and the Russian lawyer “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children”. Further reporting revealed that Trump Jr had, in fact, taken the meeting after having been offered incriminating information about Hillary Clinton, forcing the president’s son to release the email exchange leading up to the meeting.

In the emails, Trump Jr was explicitly told of an effort by the Russian government to aid Trump’s campaign, and that Veselnitskaya could offer highly sensitive information about Clinton. “If it’s what you say, I love it,” Trump Jr replied.

If the statement had been true they wouldn’t have had to keep updating it, would they.

The latest allegations about the meeting in Trump Tower dealt another blow to an already beleaguered president, placing him under the microscope as federal investigators look into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow during the presidential election. It also raised fresh questions for the justice department, some legal experts said, as special counsel Robert Mueller examines whether Trump obstructed justice.

“You’re boxing in a witness into a false story,” Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer for George W Bush, told the Guardian. “That puts them under enormous pressure to turn around and lie under oath to be consistent with their story. I think it’s obstruction of justice.”

For Trump to draft a “knowingly false” statement for his son, who could be considered a material witness in the Russia investigation, “very likely will be deemed to be obstruction of justice”, Painter said.

But it’s what any father would do!