My son was only doing opposition research, insists the President
DONALD Trump yesterday defended his oldest son over alleged links to Russia – and declared that he still wanted to invite Vladimir Putin to the White House.
President Trump insisted most people would have done the same as Donald Jnr – who tried to discover damaging information on election rival Hillary Clinton which, he was told, had been supplied by the Kremlin.
The President spoke out as Donald Jnr was asked to testify before a US Senate committee investigating the Russia scandal. At a press conference in Paris, Mr Trump described his son’s actions as ‘opposition research’ and standard practice in a US presidential election, adding: ‘Politics is not the nicest business in the world.’
His intervention came as a video emerged showing him dining with the people at the heart of the controversy. The footage shows him attending a June 2013 dinner in Las Vegas with the Azerbaijan-Russian businessmen Aras and Emin Agalarov to celebrate their partnership in hosting that year’s forthcoming Miss Universe contest in Moscow.
Mr Trump sat opposite Aras, a fellow billionaire property developer, and next to his son, Emin, who planned to use a performance at the competition to launch his career as a singer.
On the other side of Emin, and talking across him to Mr Trump in the video, is Rob Goldstone, a Mancunian talent manager who represents the younger Agalarov.
In an email exchange from June last year, Mr Goldstone told Donald Jnr that Aras Agalarov had been passed information damaging to Mrs Clinton by a Russian government official and that the Kremlin wanted a Trump election victory.
Donald Jnr and two other senior campaign aides subsequently had a meeting with Mr Goldstone and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in New York.
Yesterday President Trump made his strongest intervention on the controversy so far as he stood alongside French president Emmanuel Macron. ‘My son … took a meeting with a Russian lawyer, not a government lawyer, but a Russian lawyer,’ he said. ‘It was a meeting that went very, very quickly, very fast.’
Rebuffing ethics experts who say Donald Jnr should have alerted the FBI as soon as he heard Russia was trying to meddle in the election, the President said: ‘I think from a practical
‘Some kind of fabrication’
standpoint most people would have taken that meeting.’
Mr Trump said his son had not done anything wrong. ‘Zero happened from the meeting,’ he said. Miss Veselnitskaya has insisted she wasn’t acting for the Kremlin. However, she has a string of clients with Kremlin connections and was described in an email to Donald Jnr as a ‘Russian government lawyer’.
Critics say that even if the younger Trump didn’t receive damaging information on Mrs Clinton, his apparent eagerness to get hold of it may have encouraged Russia to hack Democrat emails. He also may have broken a law barring political campaigns from soliciting money or any ‘thing of value’ from foreigners.
Various congressional committees and the Department of Justice are investigating whether members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. One of those bodies, the Senate Judiciary Committee, yesterday said it would ask Donald Jnr to testify as soon as possible.
The new video will embarrass those involved as they try to distance themselves from each other. Donald Jnr has insisted his father never knew about the offer or the meeting.
Mr Agalarov Sr, meanwhile, has insisted he ‘doesn’t really know’ Mr Goldstone – sitting just a few feet away in the video – and has dismissed the emails as ‘some kind of fabrication’.
Earlier, while aboard Air Force One flying into Paris, Mr Trump said he was willing to engage with Russian leader President Putin despite the controversy.
Asked whether he would invite Mr Putin to the White House, Mr Trump said: ‘I don’t think this is the right time, but the answer is yes, I would.’