Trump lawyer: Secret Service allowed Russia meeting

Media blitz on US news shows as president’s approval rating sinks to historic low of 36pc

ONE of Donald Trump’s personal lawyers has hit back at allegations the president’s son was guilty of wrongdoing by meeting Russian lobbyists last year, claiming the Secret Service would not have allowed any such meeting if it broke any rules.

Jay Sekulow, who ran a White House media blitz on American breakfast TV shows yesterday, insisted there was nothing suspicious about Donald Trump Jr’s meeting with a Russian lawyer and a lobbyist at Trump Tower.

“Well, I wonder why the Secret Service, if this was nefarious, why the Secret Service allowed these people in. The president had Secret Service protection at that point, and that raised a question with me,” he told ABC News. A spokesman for the Secret Service said Mr Trump Jr was not under its protection at the time of the meeting. “Donald Trump Jr was not a protectee of the Secret Service in June 2016. Thus we would not have screened anyone he was meeting with at that time,” he said.

The Russia controversy helped push Mr Trump’s approval ratings to a new historic low. An ABC News/washington Post Poll found that only 36 per cent of Americans approved of his record after six months in office – the lowest figure for a president at this stage since records began 70 years ago. Mr Trump took to Twitter to dismiss the poll as “just about the most inaccurate” survey and defended his son.

“Hillary Clinton can illegally get the questions to the Debate & delete 33,000 emails but my son Don is being scorned by the Fake News Media,” he wrote. The counter-attacks followed a week on the back foot amid the stream of revelations about his son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer in June last year.

The emerging details suggest Mr Trump Jr agreed to meet Natalia Veselnitskaya after being told she had damaging information about Mrs Clinton as part of a Kremlin campaign to support his father in the election.

Later in the week Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-american lobbyist who once served in a counter-intelligence unit of the Soviet army, confirmed he was present at the Trump Tower meeting.

The revelations have led to a fresh slew of questions about whether Mr Trump’s campaign was colluding with Russian efforts to swing the election his way. The clouds of suspicion have kept the administration on the defensive, overshadowing efforts to make progress on Mr Trump’s political priorities. Yesterday it was the turn of Mr Sekulow, who joined Mr Trump’s expanding legal team last month, to defend his client.

He appeared on all five of America’s Sunday morning news shows, insisting the president was not present at the meeting in question and knew nothing about it at the time. “There was nothing in that meeting that is illegal, against the law,” he told Fox News Sunday.