Trump Jr. testifies before House committee

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump Jr. would not tell lawmakers about conversations he had with his father regarding a 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer after emails detailing the meeting had become public, according to the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee.

Speaking to the committee behind closed doors on Wednesday as part of its investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, Trump Jr. said he didn’t tell the president about the meeting between Trump campaign officials and Russians when it happened and he declined to elaborate on what he ultimately told him after the meeting became public.

California Rep. Adam Schiff said that Trump Jr. said he couldn’t speak about the conversations with his father this summer because of attorney-client privilege, telling the committee a lawyer was present when he spoke to his father about the June 2016 meeting and the emails that led up to it.

Schiff said that wasn’t a valid excuse not to talk, saying “the presence of counsel does not mean communications between father and son are privileged.”

Other developments

As Trump delivered his presidential inaugural address last January, his national security adviser Michael Flynn told a former business associate in text messages that a private plan to build nuclear reactors in the Mideast was “good to go” and that U.S. sanctions hobbling the plan would soon be “ripped up,” a whistleblower told congressional investigators.

The witness did not specify which sanctions Flynn was referring to in his texts. But the nuclear project that Flynn and his business associate had worked on together was stymied by U.S. financial sanctions on Russia.

The witness’s account, made public Wednesday by the ranking Democrat on the House oversight committee, raises new concerns about the extent to which Flynn may have blurred his private and public interests during his brief stint inside the White House.