President admits Trump Tower meeting was to get dirt on Clinton
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Sunday that a Trump Tower meeting between top campaign aides and a Kremlinconnected lawyer was designed to “get information on an opponent” — the starkest acknowledgment yet that a statement he dictated about the encounter last year was misleading.
Trump made the comment in a tweet Sunday morning that was intended to be a defense of the June 2016 meeting and his son Donald Trump Jr.’s role in hosting it. The president claimed it was “totally legal” and of the sort “done all the time in politics.”
But the tweet also served as an admission the Trump team had not been forthright when Trump Jr. issued a statement in July 2017 saying the meeting had been primarily about the adoption of Russian children. Trump Jr. made the statement after The New York Times revealed the existence of the meeting.
A few days later, Trump posted a tweet similar to the one he wrote Sunday morning: “Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That’s politics!” But his administration at the time was sticking to the adoption storyline, with his press secretary, Sean Spicer, saying later that day
there was no evidence anything but that topic had been discussed during the meeting.
Although the president tried again Sunday to portray the meeting as routine, it is a key focus of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller. Mueller is looking into whether the president’s campaign worked with Russians to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and whether Trump or his associates obstructed justice by lying about their activities.
It is illegal for a campaign to accept help from a foreign individual
or government.
Numerous White House aides and lawyers for the president aggressively denied at the time that the president had been involved in drafting the misleading statement. Jay Sekulow, one of the president’s lawyers, said in 2017 that “the president was not involved in the drafting of that statement.”
On Sunday, Sekulow admitted his earlier statement had been erroneous, saying on ABC News’ “This Week” that “I had bad information at that time and made a mistake in my statement.”