TRUMP DEFENDS SON’S MEETING WITH RUSSIAN.

BRIDGEWATER, N.J. • U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday offered his most definitive and clear public acknowledgment that his oldest son met with a Kremlin-aligned lawyer at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign to “get information on an opponent,” defending the meeting as “totally legal and done all the time in politics.”

It is, however, against the law for U.S. campaigns to receive donations or items of value from foreigners, and that June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Natalia Veselnitskaya is now a subject of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.

While “collusion” is not mentioned in U.S. criminal statutes, Mueller is investigating whether anyone associated with Trump co-ordinated with the Russians, which could result in criminal charges if they entered into a conspiracy to break the law, including through cyber-hacking or interfering with the election.

“Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower,” the president wrote in one of several early morning tweets Sunday, many of which took aim at the media.

“This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics — and it went nowhere.”

He concluded by further distancing himself from the meeting his son arranged, writing: “I did not know about it!”

Trump was responding to a Washington Post report over the weekend that although he does not think his eldest son intentionally broke the law, he is worried that Trump Jr. may have unintentionally stumbled into legal jeopardy and is embroiled in Mueller’s investigation largely because of his connection to the president.

The Trump Tower meeting also included Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his campaign chairman at the time, Paul Manafort, who is on trial over tax and bank fraud charges after being indicted by Mueller.

Trump’s tweet, however, conflicts with a statement that Trump Jr. had released to The New York Times in July 2017, as the newspaper prepared to report about the meeting.

In that statement, Trump Jr. had indicated that the meeting had been “primarily” about the issue of the adoption of Russian children by Americans.

Amid public uproar over the meeting, the president’s son was forced to release follow-up statements, ultimately acknowledging that the meeting’s true purpose had been to get dirt about Hillary Clinton from a lawyer he had been told was working for the Russian government.

The Washington Post reported a few weeks later that Trump Jr.’s initial misleading statement had been “dictated” by Trump.