RUSSIA PROBE:
Senate panel member: News from Trump Jr. meeting brings investigation to ‘new level’
Disclosures stemming from last summer’s meeting between President Trump’s eldest son, a Kremlin-linked lawyer and at least one other Russian could prove pivotal in the months-long probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election, senior Democrats in the House and Senate said Sunday.
WASHINGTON — Disclosures stemming from last summer’s meeting among President Donald Trump’s eldest son, a Kremlin- linked lawyer and at least one other Russian figure could prove to be a turning point in the tangled, monthslong investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, senior Democrats said Sunday.
“I would say this meeting is very significant in terms of all that’s happened,” Sen. Mark R. Warner, D-Va., the ranking member of the Senate intelligence committee, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“Only smoke and no fire? That’s clearly been put to rest,” Warner said. “This clearly brings the investigation to a new level.”
The president took to Twitter to renew his defense of Donald Trump Jr. over the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower, returning to familiar twin themes of attacking former opponent Hillary Clinton and castigating the news media over coverage of Russia-related matters.
The White House dispatched a senior member of the president’s personal legal defense team to the major Sunday news shows to play down last week’s steady drip of revelations about the meeting with lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, which was also at- tended by Trump’s son-inlaw, Jared Kushner, now a senior White House aide.
During what would normally be a time of summer doldrums in Washington, Trump — following a pomp-filled visit to Paris and a weekend getaway to his New Jersey golf property — returns after a four-day absence to a capital roiled by the burgeoning Russia inquiry and by faltering prospects for the Senate’s health care plan. Republican leadership delayed a vote on the Obamacare overhaul plan until Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., recovers from surgery to remove a blood clot.
The turmoil coincides with two new public opinion polls showing Trump’s approval ratings are plumbing depths greater than at this point in any modern presidency.
Plagued by the escalating Russia investigations, meanwhile, the White House is dubbing the coming week “Made in America week” as it tries to focus on issues that matter to the president’s base.
White House director of media affairs Helen Aguirre Ferre said Sunday that the White House will be hosting a “Made in America” product showcase Monday featuring products from all 50 states.
In the latest chapter of the Russia investigation, defenders and critics of the president offered starkly differing narratives about campaign contacts with still-unknown numbers of potentially Kremlin-associated figures and what that indicated about alleged collusion.
Warner, speaking on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” promised to widen the inquiry, bringing in “some of the folks from the Trump digital campaign” to look into the barrage of falsified news stories that appeared on social media users’ news feeds.
Trump for months has described investigations of alleged collusion between his campaign and the Kremlin as a “Dem hoax” and a “witch hunt.”
After an initial White House-sanctioned statement suggesting the meeting was mainly about Russian orphans, the younger Trump acknowledged in emails released last week that the intermediary who set up the meeting described Veselnitskaya as having access to Russian government information that could be used against Clinton. He replied: “I love it.”
In addition to Trump Jr. and Kushner, the meeting was attended by Paul Manafort, who at the time was the Trump campaign chairman, and Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American self-described lobbyist with a reported background in Russian counterintelligence.
Warner’s House counterpart, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said the meeting and the circumstances leading up to it directly established for the first time the willingness by Trump’s campaign to cooperate with what the U.S. intelligence community has concluded was a broad Russian effort to tip the election in his favor.
“They can call it a fishing expedition. They can call it a witch hunt. It’s all an aligned message with the White House,” Schiff said on ABC’s “This Week.” Even so, he said, “real evidence is coming forward that just can’t be ignored … this is about as clear of evidence you could find of intent by the campaign to collude with the Russians.”
Trump again blamed negative coverage for keeping what he has termed a baseless contro- versy alive.
“Fake News is DISTORTING DEMOCRACY in our country!” he said in an early-morning tweet from his club in Bedminster, N.J. In another Twitter statement, he said Clinton could “illegally get the questions to the Debate and delete 33,000 emails but my son Don is being scorned by the Fake News Media?”
The tweet referred to a primary debate question that had been provided to the Clinton campaign and not to her then-rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and to emails Clinton deleted from the private server she used while serving as secretary of state. The disclosure about the debate question was drawn from Russian-hacked electronic communications.
A senior member of the president’s legal team, Jay Sekulow, tried to distance the president from the affair and insisted that the 2016 meeting did not violate any criminal laws.
“I know this: He, the president, was not aware about this meeting, did not participate in this meeting,” he said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” On CNN’s “State of the Union,” he suggested that the encounter had seemed harmless at the time.
“You’re trying to put a moral, ethical aspect to it,” he complained to interviewer Jake Tapper. “And it’s easy to do that in 20/20 hindsight, but not when you’re in the middle of a campaign.”