Explanation of Trump Tower meeting has shifted
WASHINGTON — Adoptions of Russian children? Opposition research on Hillary Clinton?
President Donald Trump has for the first time acknowledged that a June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower was the latter. But he and his team have offered shifting explanations on the confab. That’s key to special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia.
A look at the details, the Trump team’s shifting explanations of the meeting, and why it matters:
It is illegal for a campaign to accept help from a foreign person or government. The U.S. intelligence community, members of Congress in both parties and even Trump have acknowledged that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Mueller is probing whether anyone connected with the president’s campaign conspired with Russia to tip the election in Trump’s favor. He’s also looking at whether Trump’s tweets, statements and other actions amount to an attempt to obstruct the investigation. the meeting. Willfully soliciting a foreign contribution is a crime,” Rick Hasen, a campaign-finance expert and law professor at the University of California, Irvine, said in a statement. “You have to know you are doing something illegal and the courts would have to consider the opposition research from Russian agents a ‘thing of value’ for campaign-finance purposes.”
Donald Trump Jr. said in a July 8, 2017, statement to The New York Times that the meeting participant “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children.” The statement does not mention that he was promised damaging information about Clinton. President Donald Trump has now acknowledged that a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower was to gather opposition research on Hillary Clinton. Committee and supporting Mrs. Clinton.” He added that “No details or supporting information was provided or even offered.” A few days later, Trump Jr. tweeted an image from an email chain he said disclosed his interest in getting incriminating information on Clinton from the “Russian government lawyer.”
The Trump camp maintains it doesn’t matter anyway, because information on Clinton was never delivered by the Russians, or received by the campaign, in the meeting.
The Times reported that the president “signed off” on his son’s statement, but Trump’s lawyer, Jay Sekulow, repeatedly denied that through the rest of that month. On July 31, 2017, The Washington Post reported that the president “personally dictated a statement in which Trump Jr. said that he and the Russian lawyer had primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children” at the Trump Tower meeting.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters that the president “certainly didn’t dictate” the statement. Yes. In January this year, Trump lawyers John Dowd and Sekulow wrote to Mueller, in part, that “the president dictated a short but accurate response to the New York Times article on behalf of his son, Donald Trump Jr.” Dowd subsequently resigned from the Trump team. Sekulow said this past weekend that he had been acting on “bad information” at the time.
The president appeared to change his story in a Sunday tweet in which for the first time he confirmed that the Trump Tower meeting was supposed to produce dirt on Clinton.
“This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics — and it went nowhere,” said Trump. He went on to distance himself from Trump Jr. and the meeting: “I did not know about it!”
Trump Jr. spoke by phone several days before the meeting with a caller who had a blocked number, but he said he didn’t recall who the person was and didn’t know if his father used a blocked number. He told the committee that he didn’t alert his father to the meeting beforehand.
Whatever his explanation, Trump has consistently said he didn’t know about the Trump Tower meeting.