Trump’s son in eye of storm
JNR BACKED RUSSIA’S BID TO SUPPORT HIS FATHER’S PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN Revelation puts president’s son at the centre of probe into collusion.
Donald Trump’s eldest son released e-mails on Tuesday showing he embraced Russian efforts to support his father’s presidential campaign, a shocking disclosure likely to further fuel speculation over Moscow’s suspected role in the US election.
The revelation puts the president’s son at the centre of a burgeoning scandal involving multiple US investigations into whether Trump associates colluded with Moscow in its efforts to tilt the 2016 election in the Republican’s favour.
In a string of e-mails released on Tuesday, Donald Trump Jnr was told by an interlocutor that he could get “very high level and sensitive information” that was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr Trump”.
In response, the 39-year-old wrote back saying: “If it’s what you say I love it”. He then set up a meeting with a “Russian government attorney”, the e-mails show.
The e-mail chain was released in its entirety by Trump Jnr in a move that jolted Washington, and added fuel to the firestorm swirling over allegations that Trump’s campaign team colluded with Moscow to influence the 2016 election.
Speaking to Fox News, Trump Jnr said he didn’t tell his father about the meeting after it failed to yield compromising information about his election rival Hillary Clinton. “It was such a nothing. There was nothing to tell,” he said, while appearing to acknowledge the misstep. “In retrospect, I probably would have done things a little differently,” he admitted. “For me this was opposition research, they had something, maybe concrete evidence to all the stories I’d been hearing about.”
US intelligence agencies concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin approved a mass effort to tilt the election in Trump’s favour. In a statement accompanying the e-mails, Trump junior said he believed the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, “as she has said publicly, was not a government official”. Speaking to Fox, he said: “We didn’t know who she was before the meeting.”
However, Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, two of Trump’s most trusted campaign officials, attended the meeting.
In an interview with CNN late on Tuesday, the president’s lawyer Jay Sekulow stressed Trump had not been aware of his son’s meeting with Veselnitskaya until “very recently”. – AFP