Russian meeting not an issue for Trump
US president defends son over talks with lawyer during presidential polls.
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said he did not fault his son Donald Trump Jr for meeting with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 presidential election campaign and that he was unaware of the meeting until a few days ago.
Asked if he knew that his son was meeting with lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in June, the president said: “No, I didn’t know until a couple of days ago when I heard about this.”
Seated at his Oval Office desk, Trump wrote it off as a decision made in the heat of an upstart, non-traditional campaign.
“I think many people would have held that meeting,” Trump said.
“It was a 20-minute meeting, I guess, from what I’m hearing.”
The emails were the most concrete evidence that Trump campaign officials might have been willing to accept Russian help to win the Nov 8 election, a subject that has cast a cloud over Trump’s presidency and prompted investigations by the US Justice Department and Congress.
Donald Jr, in an interview he gave with Fox News on Tuesday, said: “In retrospect, I probably would have done things a little differently.”
In the White House interview, the president said he directly asked Russian President Vladimir Putin if he was involved in what US intelligence says was Russian meddling in the presidential campaign and that Putin had insisted he was not.
Trump said he spent the first 20 or 25 minutes of his more than twohour meeting with Putin last Friday in Germany on the election meddling subject.
“I said, ‘Did you do it?’ And he said, ‘No, I did not.’”
Asked if he believed Putin’s denial, Trump said: “Somebody did say if he did do it, you wouldn’t have found out about it. Which is a very interesting point.”