Trump team met Russian about Clinton
President Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign, according to three advisers to the
White House briefed on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it.
The meeting also was attended by the candidate’s campaign chairman at the time, Paul Manafort, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Manafort and Kushner only recently disclosed the meeting, though not its content, in confidential government documents described to The New York Times.
The Times reported the existence of the meeting on Saturday, but in subsequent interviews, the advisers and others revealed the motivation behind it.
The meeting — at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, two weeks after Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination — points to the central question in federal investigations of the Kremlin’s meddling in the presidential election: whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians. The accounts of the meeting represent the first public indication that at least some in the campaign were willing to accept Russian help.
And while Trump has been dogged by revelations of undisclosed meetings between his associates and the Russians, the episode at Trump Tower is the first such confirmed private meeting involving members of his inner circle during the campaign — as well as the first one known to have included his eldest son. The June meeting came at an inflection point in the campaign, when Trump Jr., who served as an adviser and a surrogate, was ascendant, and Manafort was consolidating power.
It is unclear whether the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, produced the promised compromising information about Clinton. But the people interviewed by The Times about the meeting said the expectation was that she would do so.
In a statement Sunday, Trump Jr. said he had met with the Russian lawyer at the request of an acquaintance. “After pleasantries were exchanged,” he said, “the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton. Her statements were vague,
ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”
He said she then turned the conversation to the adoption of Russian children and the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law that blacklists suspected Russian human-rights abusers. The 2012 law so enraged President Vladimir Putin of Russia that he retaliated by halting U.S. adoptions of Russian children.
“It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting,” Trump Jr. said.
When he was first asked about the meeting Saturday, he said only that it was primarily about adoptions, mentioning nothing about Clinton.
Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the president’s lawyer, said Sunday that “the president was not aware of and did not attend the meeting.”
Lawyers and spokesmen for Kushner and Manafort did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In his statement, Trump Jr. said he had asked Manafort and Kushner to attend the meeting but
did not tell them what it would be about.
U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russian hackers and propagandists worked to tip the election toward Donald Trump, in part by stealing and then providing to WikiLeaks internal Democratic Party and Clinton campaign emails that were embarrassing to Clinton.
A special prosecutor and congressional committees are investigating the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with the Russians. Trump has disputed that.
On Sunday morning on Fox News, the White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, described the Trump Tower meeting as a “big nothing burger.”
“Talking about issues of foreign policy, issues related to our place in the world, issues important to the American people is not unusual,” he said.
But Rep. Adam B. Schiff of California, the leading Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, one of the panels investigating Russian election interference, said he wanted to question “everyone that was at that meeting.”
“There’s no reason for this Russian government advocate to be meeting with Paul Manafort or with Mr. Kushner or the president’s son if it wasn’t about the campaign and Russia policy,” Schiff said after the initial New York Times report.
Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer invited to the Trump Tower meeting, is best known for mounting a multipronged attack against the Magnitsky Act. The adoption impasse is a frequently used talking point for opponents of the act.
Her clients include stateowned businesses and a senior government official’s son whose company was under investigation in the United States at the time of the meeting. Her activities and associations had previously drawn the attention of the FBI, according to a former senior law-enforcement official.
Veselnitskaya said in a statement Saturday that “nothing at all about the presidential campaign” was discussed. She recalled that after about 10 minutes, either Kushner or Manafort walked out.
She said she had “never acted on behalf of the Russian government” and “never discussed any of these matters with any representative of the Russian government.”