Trump backtracks on joint cyber unit
washington — US President Donald Trump said on Sunday he wanted to work “constructively” with Russia despite confronting Vladimir Putin over alleged election meddling, as reports broke that his eldest son met a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign.
The New York Times, citing advisers briefed on the meeting, reported that Donald Trump Jr. attended the meeting after being promised “damaging information” about his father’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton — the latest revelation to surface in the probe over possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Trump’s eldest son was reportedly joined by the US president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort for the June 2016 meeting in New York with the Kremlin-connected lawyer, the earliest such contact yet reported.
The younger Trump said in a statement to the Times that the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, “stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Mrs Clinton”.
“It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information,” he said, adding that the lawyer then began discussing the adoption of Russian children by American couples under a programme Putin had suspended.
The president’s son said he gathered that the adoption issue was “the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting”.
The report followed a series of earlymorning tweets by Trump two days after his first face-to-face talks with his Russian counterpart, in which he said he confronted Putin when they met in Germany over evidence from the intelligence agencies that Moscow interfered in the US election.
“I strongly pressed President Putin twice about Russian meddling in our election,” he said of Friday’s meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Hamburg. “He vehemently denied it. I’ve already given my opinion...”
While ruling out easing sanctions so long as the two countries remain at odds over Syria and Ukraine, Trump said it was time for US-Russia relations to move forward, even as members of his own Republican party said he should be mulling new punishments. —