President defends Trump Jr.’s meeting
President Donald Trump again defended his son Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian attorney last year during the campaign, saying in a news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday that “zero” improprieties occurred in a meeting that “most people would have taken.”
“As far as my son is concerned, my son is a wonderful young man,” Trump said. “He took a meeting with a Russian lawyer, not a government lawyer, but a Russian lawyer.”
In fact, Trump Jr. accepted a meeting with a woman who was described to him in an email as a “Russian government attorney” who he believed possessed incriminating information about Hillary Clinton, which could help his father’s presidential campaign.
Trump’s comments in Paris marked yet another instance in which a domestic controversy has followed him abroad, this time in the form of a newly disclosed meeting between a Russian attorney with Kremlin ties and Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, and Paul Manafort, who was serving as Trump’s campaign chairman at the time.
“I do think this: I think from a practical standpoint most people would have taken that meeting,” Trump said. “It’s called opposition research or even research into your opponent.”
However, Christopher A. Wray, Trump’s nominee to serve as FBI director, said in congressional testimony Wednesday that any politician receiving such an email from a foreign entity offering damaging information on a political opponent should alert the FBI: “Any threat or effort to interfere with our elections from any nationstate or any nonstate actor is the kind of thing the FBI would want to know,” Wray said.
But Trump cast the meeting as simply standard practice in the cutthroat world of presidential politics, saying he often received phone calls from people saying that had information that could damage Clinton.
“Politics is not the nicest business in the world, but it’s very standard where they have information and you take the information,” the president said.