Treason claims over Trump Jr’s meeting

DONALD Trump Jr, who met a Kremlin-linked lawyer promising “incriminating” evidence about Hillary Clinton during the election campaign, has now admitted being told it was part of Russia’s support for his father.

A firestorm of criticism, including accusations of treason, erupted after Donald Jr released an email chain concerning the June 9 meeting he, then campaign manager Paul Manafort and Donald Trump Sr’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, had with Natalia Veselnitskaya.

The emails revealed Donald Jr’s excitement over a possible dirt file. “If it’s what you say, I love it,” he wrote to go-between Rob Goldstone, a British music publicist who has previously lived and worked in Australia.

The emails showed that on June 3, Mr Goldstone told Donald Jr that “the crown prosecutor of Russia” had offered “to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father”.

“This is obviously very high-level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr Trump,” Mr Goldstone wrote.

He described Ms Veselnitskaya as a “Russian government attorney”.

Donald Jr has said that at the meeting it quickly became clear that she had no information.

The White House said accusations of treason were “ridiculous”. (THAAD) system saw a ballistic missile launched from an Air Force C-17 over the Pacific Ocean north of Hawaii.

“A THAAD weapon system . . . in Kodiak, Alaska, detected, tracked and intercepted the target,” the Missile Defence Agency said. The system is designed to intercept and destroy short, medium and intermedi-

In a brief statement in response to the release of the email chain, President Trump said: “My son is a high-quality person and I applaud his transparency.”

Appearing on Fox News, Donald Jr said he agreed to the meeting only because he was seeking evidence of his suspicions that the Democratic campaign was working with the Russians.

He had not told his father about the meeting, as it turned out to be “a nothing”. ate range ballistic missiles in their final phase of flight.

THAAD maker Lockheed Martin said it was the first time the system had intercepted an intermediate-range missile.

Such exercises are planned months in advance, although this one followed last week’s test by the North of a missile capable of reaching the US.

“For me, this was opposition research,” he said.

“They had something, you know, maybe concrete evidence to all the stories I’d been hearing about … so I think I wanted to hear it out.

“But really it went nowhere … I wouldn’t have even remembered it until you started scouring through this stuff. It was literally just a wasted 20 minutes, which was a shame.”

Given the fallout, he agreed he “probably would have done things a little differently”.

THAAD is not designed to stop an intercontinental ballistic missile — that job is left mainly to the ground-based GMD interceptor system.

The US military this year began deploying THAAD to South Korea, a move that infuriated China, which has argued it would further destabilise the Korean peninsula.

Richard Painter, a Bush administration lawyer, said it was illegal for a party to accept “foreign contributions of money or services”, which could include information.

He said the revelations could harm the president.

“They said there’s no collusion and now we see clearly that Donald Trump Jr wanted to collude.”