Nobody has claimed otherwise. But campaign law clearly makes it a crime to solicit anything of value from a foreign national for purposes of a campaign, and the purpose of that meeting was expressly to solicit valuable information from the Russian government for purposes of the campaign. At this point, the Trump-apologist's only real defense is to claim that there is a secret part of the law that says "thing of value" cannot include valuable information.
Now, that's not to say the Trump legal team can't put forward the novel idea that the law is unenforceable against them because of the first amendment. And with the Supreme Court in the control of far-right-wing judges, they might even win. But step one is to indict them for it and force them to offer that as an affirmative defense, so it can be ruled on.
Of course, if the Supreme Court comes up with an unprecedented activist ruling to redefine the first amendment to allow this, it's basically game over for keeping foreign influence out of our elections. Once you have an exception that says foreign governments can assist American political campaigns as much as they like so long as they only provide "information," that exception wholly consumes the rule, since practically everything that's needed to run a campaign is information. At that point, the foreign governments could effectively just act as information service outsourcers for the campaigns of their choosing. They could do all the work of polling, building voter databases, designing campaign ads, writing speeches, hosting cloud services, doing campaign strategy, conducting debate prep, researching position papers, and so on. As long as it's "just information," it would all be legal. And since the lion's share of a campaign's expenses are outsourceable as information services, you may as well not have a rule against foreign involvement in the first place.
If that's how it worked, then foreign governments could donate anything they want to a campaign. "Hey, here's a private plane to fly you around the country." As long as the campaign didn't offer anything of value in exchange for it, then it would be said to have no value and would be allowed. For very obvious reasons, that's not how it works.
Again, you're entirely wrong. The threat to the Republic, here is the law-compressing favored by the Trump apologists. They are willing to fold, spindle, and mutilate any law to the extent necessary to say that anything Trump did must be legal. If that means inventing a new rule that says information has no value for statutory purposes, that's just what they'll do, because their loyalty is to Trump, not our nation.
