Pols to Junior: Tell all
Probers threaten subpoenas
THE SENATE Judiciary Committee wants to hear Donald Trump Jr.’s account of his 2016 muckraking meet-up with a Russian lawyer.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said his committee will reach out by letter to the real estate scion regarding the recently revealed emails shared between Trump Jr. and music publicist Rob Goldstone.
If the younger Trump doesn’t agree to show up, a subpoena will follow, he said.
Both Grassley and Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein said they would like Trump Jr. to testify in the near future as part of their probe into Russian meddling during the presidential campaign.
Panel members will be free to ask “anything they want to ask,” Grassley said Thursday.
Witnesses who decline to answer subpoenas can be held in contempt. A lawyer for Trump Jr. did not comment Thursday, but his client expressed a willingness to testify under oath.
“In retrospect, I probably would have done things a little differently,” Trump Jr. said Tuesday night on Fox News.
On Tuesday, Donald Jr. posted a series of emails in which Goldstone offered him an opportunity to receive damaging information about Hillary Clinton from the Russian government.
Trump Jr. said that a June 9, 2016, meeting followed — but no meaningful information changed hands during the Trump Tower get-together. Other attendees included his brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
But the emails showed Trump Jr. appeared eager to accept negative information from the Russians as his father ran for the White House against Clinton.
Manafort could also appear next week before the committee in its ongoing Russia probe.
President Trump, meanwhile, defended his son during a joint news conference with the French president in Paris.
“My son is a wonderful young man who took a meeting with a Russian lawyer — not a government lawyer, but a Russian lawyer,” Trump said.
In the emails, the attorney was described as working for the “Russian government,” having Clinton dirt courtesy of “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
The President blamed Obamaera Attorney General Loretta Lynch for allowing the lawyer into the country in the first place — a charge Lynch denied.
As the Daily News first reported Wednesday, the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office provided lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya with a waiver allowing her to enter the country without a visa for a case — but that “parole letter” expired months before the June 2016 meeting.