Trump: Meeting for information was legal
President admits purpose was to get Clinton information
President Donald Trump tweeted himself into a more perilous legal position Sunday by confirming a 2016 meeting was about information on Hillary Clinton.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Sunday that a Trump Tower meeting between top campaign aides and a Kremlin-connected lawyer was designed to “get information on an opponent” — the starkest acknowledgment yet that a statement he dictated last year about the encounter was misleading.
Trump made the comment in a tweet Sunday morning that was intended to be a defense of the June 2016 meeting and the role his son Donald Trump Jr.’s played in hosting it. The president claimed that it was “totally legal” and of the sort “done all the time in politics.”
But the tweet also served as an admission that the Trump team had not been forthright when Trump Jr. issued a statement in July 2017 saying that the meeting had been primarily about the adoption of Russian children.
That statement is being scrutinized by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, who is examining a broad array of Trump’s tweets and public statements to determine whether he made them as part of an effort to deceive investigators.
People close to the president believe that he may be increasing his legal jeopardy by continuing to speak publicly about sensitive matters even as his campaign is under investigation for possible collusion with Russia and he himself is under scrutiny for possible obstruction of justice. Just last week, Trump said in a tweet that Attorney General Jeff Sessions should shut down the special counsel investigation.
While the president tried again Sunday to portray the Trump Tower meeting as routine, it is being examined as part of Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump’s campaign conspired with the Russians to undermine Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
It is illegal for a campaign to accept help from a foreign individual or government. The president and his son have maintained that the campaign did not ultimately receive any damaging materials about Clinton as a result of the meeting. But some legal experts contend that by simply sitting for the meeting, Trump Jr. broke the law.
In his tweet Sunday, the president denied a report in The Washington Post that he was worried about the legal exposure for Trump Jr. While the president said that the meeting was legal, he also distanced himself from it, repeating his assertion that he knew nothing about it at the time.
Trump Jr. issued his statement in July 2017 after The New York Times revealed the existence of the meeting. The meeting’s true purpose was exposed a few days later when The Times published emails between Trump Jr. and Rob Goldstone, a British-born former tabloid reporter and entertainment publicist who helped arrange it. Goldstone said he had “something very interesting” — sensitive information that “is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
After the meeting was revealed, Trump posted a tweet similar to the one he wrote Sunday morning: “Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That’s politics!” But his administration at the time was sticking to the adoption storyline, with his press secretary, Sean Spicer, saying later that day there was no evidence that anything but that topic had been discussed during the meeting.
Numerous White House aides and lawyers for the president aggressively denied at the time that the president had been involved in drafting the misleading statement. Jay Sekulow, one of the president’s lawyers, said in 2017 that “the president was not involved in the drafting of that statement.” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the current press secretary, insisted that the president “certainly didn’t dictate” the statement.
But the Post reported in July 2017 that Trump had in fact done so. And earlier this year, Trump’s lawyers acknowledged in a memo to Mueller that the president had dictated the statement.
On Sunday, Sekulow admitted that his earlier statement had been erroneous, saying on ABC News’ “This Week” that “I had bad information at that time and made a mistake in my statement.”