Russian contacts dog White House
Trump family’s, aides’ dealings make it tough to dodge issue
WASHINGTON— President Donald Trump’s immediate family and closest advisers repeatedly have made it harder for him to dismiss questions about his campaign’s contacts with Moscow. Again and again, after denying dealings with Russia, they have been forced to alter their stories.
The latest example, involving Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, increased the political peril for the White House, drawing yet another family member into the public debate over Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election.
Trump Jr. had previously disavowed any campaign interactions with Russians but acknowledged Sunday that he met in June 2016 with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer who, he said, had promised information “helpful to the campaign.”
The shifting stories about Russia contacts have frustrated the president’s attempts to move beyond questions about Russia and the election. The latest disclosures also provide potential new avenues for the investigation being run by Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is looking at whether the campaign’s contacts with Russians— or the failure of Trump’s aides to disclose them — violated any U.S. laws.
Trump Jr. recently hired a well-known Manhattan criminal defense lawyer, Alan Futerfas. Although the hiring was publicly acknowledged Monday, neither Trump Jr. nor Futerfas said how long ago he was engaged.
On Monday, Deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders denied that any Trump campaign officials colluded with the Russian government to influence the election, insisting that the Veselnitskaya meeting had come to light only because Jared Kushner, the president’s adviser and son-inlaw, and former campaign manager Paul Mana fort had amended their federal disclosure forms to mention it.
“The only thing I see inappropriate about the meetingwas the people that leaked the information on the meeting after it was voluntarily disclosed,” she said.
Trump Jr.’s account of his meeting suggests that wellconnected Russians were reaching out to the campaign beginning at least as early as Trump’s winning of the GOP nomination, using the offer of damaging information against the Democrats to gain access to the top levels of the campaign. The existence of the meeting was first disclosed by The New York Times.
In his statement, Trump Jr. denied wrongdoing. He described the half-hour encounter with Veselnitskaya, which Kushner and Manafort also attended, as brief and unproductive. And he suggested that her objective had been to enlist Trump’s help in overturning a U.S. law that targets Russian officials.
Veselnitskaya claimed to have information about individuals connected to Russia “funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton,” Trump Jr. said in his statement, but “it quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”
She shifted the conversation to “adoption of Russian children” and the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law that bars certain Russian officials from entering the U.S. and using U.S. banks, he said.
“I interrupted and advised her that my father was not an elected official, but rather a private citizen, and that her comments and concerns were better addressed if and when he held public office,” he added.
Sanders, the White House spokeswoman, insisted there was less to the meeting than news reports implied.
“I’ve been on several campaigns and people call offering information, as I know many of you receive calls of people offering information,” she said. “Don Jr. took a very short meeting from which therewas absolutely no follow-up.”
The president returned Saturday froma brief trip to Poland and Germany, where he met with Putin for the first time since taking office.
Administration officials say he asked Putin about Russian interference in the election, something Moscow and Trump have both dismissed in the past as a hoax. Russian officials said Trump accepted Putin’s denial.
Sanders said that in the meeting with Putin, Trump didn’t dwell on allegations of Russia’s meddling, which U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies have said represented a coordinated campaign to tip the outcome toward the Republican.
Rather than talk more about Russia, the White House sought to draw attention to a report that was featured on a segment of “Fox & Friends” involving former FBI Director James Comey.
Trump, in a tweet Monday morning, incorrectly asserted that the report, first published in a Capitol Hill newspaper, showed that Comey had leaked classified information.
The report concerned seven memos that Comey wrote about his conversations with Trump. In testimony to Congress, Comey said some of the memos had been classified and others had been nonclassified. The new report said at least four of the seven were classified.
The one memo that Comey made public, acting through a friend, was not classified, he testified.
No evidence has become public to contradict that, and the report Trump relied on did not suggest otherwise.