Trump changes tack

President alters his story surrounding son’s Russian meeting

US PRESIDENT Donald Trump appears to have changed his story about a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower that is pivotal to the special counsel’s investigation, tweeting that his son met with a Kremlin-connected lawyer to collect information about his political opponent.

“Fake news reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower,” Mr Trump wrote in a Sunday tweet.

“This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics – and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!” But 13 months ago Mr Trump gave a far different explanation for the meeting.

A July 2017 statement dictated by the president but released under the name of Donald Trump Jr read: “We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago.”

The latest twist came amid a series of searing tweets sent from his New Jersey golf club, in which he tore into two of his favourite targets, the news media and Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation into possible links between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Mr Trump unleashed particular fury at reports that he was anxious about the Trump Tower meeting attended by Donald Trump Jr and other senior campaign officials.

Mr Trump’s critics immediately pounced on the new story, the latest of several versions of events about a meeting for which emails were discovered between the president’s eldest son and an intermediary from the Russian government offering damaging information about Mr Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Betraying no surprise or misgivings about the offer from a hostile foreign power, Mr Trump Jr replied: “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”