Trump defends meeting

US President Donald Trump 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.

The aim was to “get information on an opponent,” and Trump defended the meeting as “totally legal and done all the time in politics”.

It is, however, against the law for US campaigns to receive donations or items of value from foreigners, and that June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump jnr 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 coordinated 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 tweeted. “This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics — and it went nowhere.”

He further distanced himself, writing, “I did not know about it!”

Trump was responding to a Washington Post report that although he does not think his eldest son intentionally broke the law, he is worried that Trump jnr may have unintentionally stumbled into legal jeopardy.

Trump’s tweet conflicts with a statement that Trump jnr released to the New York Times in July 2017. that the meeting had been “primarily” about the issue of the adoption of Russian children by Americans. 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. The Post reported that Trump jnr’s initial misleading statement had been “dictated” by Trump.— Washington Post