Don Jr. met Russians for dirt on Hill: Trump
Belies claim of Russia ‘adoption’ meet
Defending his son’s meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer, President Trump on Sunday acknowledged more directly than he ever has that the sitdown was intended to acquire “information” on Hillary Clinton — an admission clearly at odds with an earlier statement he had a hand in crafting.
Trump was reacting to weekend reports in the Washington Post and on CNN that he has grown worried Donald Trump Jr. may be in the crosshairs of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling during the presidential campaign, for setting up the June 9, 2016, Trump Tower meeting.
“Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am con- cerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower,” Trump wrote from his golf resort in Bedminster, NJ, where he’s spending an 11-day working vacation.
“This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics — and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!”
In going to bat for his oldest son, Trump revealed that the meeting was not primarily about adoption policy, as Donald Jr. claimed in a statement July 8, 2017, after the encounter was revealed by the New York Times.
In January, Trump’s legal team, including lawyer Jay Sekulow, wrote a memo to Mueller saying the president helped dictate the statement on behalf of his son.
“I had bad information at that time and made a mistake in my statement,” Sekulow admitted Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “That happens when you have cases like this.”
Donald Jr. eventually released a series of e-mails showing the Russian lawyer promised information on Clinton that could help the Trump campaign — and his “I love it” reply.
Trump used similar language in his Sunday tweet as he did on July 13, 2017, when he called the meeting normal practice during a campaign.
“It’s called opposition research, or even research into your opponent,” he said. “Politics is not the nicest business in the world, but it’s very standard where they have information and you take the information.”
Trump has also claimed he didn’t know about the meeting, and his son told congressional panels that he doesn’t recall telling his dad about it.
But Trump’s former longtime fixer and personal lawyer Michael Cohen said he was prepared to tell Mueller that the president had prior knowledge of the meeting, which was also attended by Jared Kushner and then-campaign chair Paul Manafort, whose federal trial for tax fraud is underway in Virginia.
Sekulow on Sunday also suggested Donald Jr. committed no crime: “Well, the question is, how would it be illegal? The question is what law, statute or rule or regulation’s been violated? Nobody’s pointed to one.”
The president on Sunday called Mueller’s probe “the most one sided Witch Hunt in the history of our country” in a tweet.