Russia scandal deepens
Son-in-law and key adviser revealed to be among those who spoke with ambassador.
The White House has revealed further contacts between senior advisers and the Russian ambassador to the US, after President Donald Trump complained of a witchhunt against his administration.
Officials confirmed that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and one of his closest confidants, met Sergey Kislyak in a previously undisclosed 20-minute meeting in Trump Tower in New York last December.
Mike Flynn, the retired general who resigned last month as national security adviser after he misrepresented his conversations with Kislyak, was also present.
Contacts between Russian officials and Trump campaign staff are the subject of investigations by the FBI and two congressional intelligence committees. They are examining alleged Kremlin meddling in last November’s presidential election.
It emerged that Kislyak also met two other Trump campaign advisers during the Republican national convention last July: Carter Page, a former banker who has advised on Russian energy deals and who lived in Moscow for several years, and J D Gordon, who was a national security adviser to Trump.
It is not unusual for foreign diplomats to have contact with presidential campaigns, and the State Department funded an initiative to bring foreign ambassadors to the Republican and Democrat political conventions last year.
The White House, however, has repeatedly downplayed the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russian officials. The issue threatened to overshadow a speech Trump made to Congress this week, where he laid out an ambitious programme of spending increases and cuts that will face resistance from fiscal conservatives.
Jeff Sessions, the attorneygeneral, has decided to step away from any investigation into Kremlin meddling in the election after it emerged that he had spoken to Kislyak twice, in July and September. Sessions was criticised by Democrats for telling a Senate confirmation hearing in January that he did not ‘‘have communications with the Russians’’ while acting as a surrogate for the Trump campaign.
In a series of tweets yesterday, Trump said his attorney-general had been the victim of a witchhunt.
‘‘Jeff Sessions is an honest man. He did not say anything wrong. He
Sergei Lavrov, Russian foreign minister
All this is very much reminiscent of a witch-hunt and the McCarthyism era. could have stated his response more accurately, but it was clearly not intentional . . . The real story is all of the illegal leaks of classified and other information.’’
Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said: ‘‘All this is very much reminiscent of a witchhunt and the McCarthyism era that we all thought was long gone.’’
Trump is calling for ‘‘an immediate investigation’’ into Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer’s own ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump’s evidence? A 14-year-old photo of Schumer and Putin holding coffee and doughnuts in a New York City gas station.
The president yesterday tweeted a photo of the two men, calling for a probe into Schumer’s ‘‘ties to Russia and Putin’’, and called the New York senator ‘‘A total hypocrite!’’.
Trump did not say where the photo came from, but Schumer quickly pointed out that it was taken in 2003, when Putin ventured to New York to celebrate the opening of a Russian-owned Lukoil gas station on Manhattan’s west side.
Several news organisations covered that event, which drew far more political star power than the average gas station opening.
Schumer, in his own tweet, said he would ‘‘happily talk’’ under oath about his meeting with Putin, which took place ‘‘in full view of press and public’’ He challenged Trump to do the same.
A short time later, he posted a follow-up in which he further poked fun at the photo, noting: ‘‘And for the record, they were Krispy Kreme donuts.’’
On the same trip to the US in 2003, Putin travelled to Camp David, Maryland, where he met with Republican President George W Bush and the two held a joint news conference.
Trump’s tweet came just hours after the conservative website Drudge Report made the photo its lead image. That was a day after the photo was unearthed by the pro-Trump blog Gateway Pundit, which ran it with the ‘‘Where’s the outrage?’’
Trump also tweeted about House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who was among the first to call for Sessions to resign.
In his tweet, Trump linked to a 2010 photo in which Pelosi and other lawmakers, including Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, now the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, are shown meeting with Russian officials, including then-president Dmitry Medvedev and Kislyak.
Trump demanded an investigation of the House minority leader.
Pelosi had initially denied ever meeting Kislyak; her spokeswoman later clarified that they never had a one-on-one meeting.
Pelosi then needled Trump by saying he didn’t ‘‘know the difference’’ between an official meeting photographed by the press and a ‘‘secret’’ meeting that Sessions ‘‘lied about under oath’’.
Many Democrats have called for Sessions’ resignationand have demanded an independent investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. headline: