Trump admits dodgy meeting
American President Donald Trump yesterday offered his most definitive and clear public acknowledgment that his oldest son met with a Kremlin-aligned lawyer at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign to ‘‘get information on an opponent,’’ defending the meeting as ‘‘totally legal and done all the time in politics’’.
It is, however, against the law for United States political campaigns to receive donations or items of value from foreigners, and that June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr and Natalia Veselnitskaya is now a subject of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
While ‘‘collusion’’ is not mentioned in US criminal statutes, Mueller is investigating whether anyone associated with Trump co-ordinated with the Russians, which could result in criminal charges if they entered into a conspiracy to break the law, including through cyberhacking or interfering with the election.
‘‘Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower,’’ the president wrote in one of several earlymorning tweets yesterday, many of which took aim at the news media.
‘‘This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics – and it went nowhere.’’
He concluded by further distancing himself from the meeting his son arranged, writing: ‘‘I did not know about it!’’ Trump was responding to a
report this weekend that, although he does not think his eldest son intentionally broke the law, he is worried that Trump Jr may have unintentionally stumbled into legal jeopardy and is embroiled in Mueller’s investigation largely because of his connection to the president.
Yesterday, one of the president’s attorneys defended the 2016 meeting as something that would not have been illegal under any federal statute.
‘‘The question is: How would it be illegal?’’ Jay Sekulow asked on ABC News’ This Week, suggesting that there are no laws prohibiting campaign operatives from meeting and working with foreign agents. ‘‘Nobody has pointed to one.’’
The Trump Tower meeting also included Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his campaign chairman at the time, Paul Manafort, who is on trial over tax and bank fraud charges after being indicted by Mueller.
Trump’s tweet, however, conflicts with a statement that Trump Jr released to the New York Times in July 2017, as the newspaper prepared to report on the meeting.
In that statement, Trump Jr indicated the meeting had been ‘‘primarily’’ about the issue of the adoption of Russian children by Americans.
Amid public uproar over the meeting, the president’s son was forced to release follow-up statements, ultimately acknowledging that the meeting’s true purpose had been to get dirt about Hillary Clinton from a lawyer he had been told was working for the Russian Government.
At the time, in July 2017, Trump offered a similar comment to the one he made yesterday, dismissing the meeting with a Russian lawyer promising dirt on his political opponent as no big deal. Washington Post
‘‘Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower.’’ United States President Donald Trump