Junior’s bumbles on Russian meet
DONALD TRUMP JR. saw nothing wrong with meeting a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower ahead of the 2016 presidential election — and maintains he’s never talked about the federal probe into election meddling with his father.
President Trump’s eldest son made those and other hard-toswallow claims during hours of congressional questioning last year, according to transcripts released Wednesday.
The Senate Judiciary Committee released more than 2,500 pages of testimony, notes and statements from the eight people who attended a notorious June 9, 2016, Trump Tower meeting.
The transcripts reveal new details about how that meeting — which is being eyed by special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe — came to be.
Trump Jr. (photo) was asked during his testimony whether he and his father have ever talked about Mueller’s probe — which the President has publicly called a “witch hunt.”
“No, not that I remember,” Trump Jr. (inset) said, according to the transcripts.
He also said he didn’t think there was anything wrong with accepting the sitdown after being told of a Russian government effort to help his father win the White House and the offer of “dirt” on his father’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.
“I didn’t think that listening to someone with information relevant to the fitness and character of a presidential candidate would be an issue, no,” he said.
Trump Jr. also said he never told his father about the meeting beforehand, despite a mysterious call from a blocked number days earlier.
Muddying the waters, Trump Jr. also admitted to lawmakers that his father may have weighed in directly as his lawyers drafted an initial misleading response to reports about the meeting.
Michael Caputo, a senior communications director for the Trump campaign didn’t attend the confab, but knew about it. He admitted that it was a “mistake.”
“Donald Jr. was very eager to do something for his dad, and so he did something careless,” Caputo told the Daily News. “It was very frustrating.”