Trump Jr. will face inquiry on WikiLeaks

WASHINGTON — After his father was elected president, Donald Trump Jr. said he would turn his attention away from politics and back to running the family business empire.

But President Donald Trump’s eldest son has been unable to completely turn the page as investigators scrutinize his contacts with Russian intermediaries during the campaign last year. He’s scheduled to return to Capitol Hill today to answer questions behind closed doors with the House intelligence committee.

At issue are recent revelations about communications between Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks, the secretive web organization that released hacked Democratic Party emails as part of what U.S. intelligence officials say was a Russian effort to help sway the election to Trump.

Trump Jr. publicly disclosed the private Twitter messages, which were exchanged from Sept. 2016 through July 2017, after their existence was revealed by The Atlantic.

Most of the outreach from WikiLeaks went unanswered by Trump Jr., according to the messages he released. But two days after WikiLeaks asked him to help promote a website where it was posting emails stolen from the account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, Trump Jr. shared the link on his Twitter account.

The communications with WikiLeaks stoked fresh interest in Trump Jr.’s broader role in the campaign.

He already has acknowledged meeting in June 2016 with a Russian lawyer who promised that she had incriminating information on Hillary Clinton that could help his father’s White House bid.

“To the extent they had information concerning the fitness, character or qualifications of a presidential candidate, I believed that I should at least hear them out,” he said when he met with the Senate Judiciary Committee in September.

Trump Jr. said the meeting did not produce any useful information about Trump’s Democratic rival and soon shifted to a dispute over a U.S. law that levied sanctions on some Russian officials and businessmen.