Mueller focuses on Trump Tower cover story
President’s role in creating statement now under scrutiny
WASHINGTON — Aboard Air Force One on a flight home from Europe in July, President Donald Trump and his advisers raced to cobble together a news release about a mysterious meeting at Trump Tower the previous summer between Russians and top Trump campaign officials. Rather than acknowledge the meeting’s intended purpose — to obtain political dirt about Hillary Clinton from the Russian government — the statement instead described the meeting as being about an obscure Russian adoption policy.
The statement has become a focus of the inquiry by Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. Prosecutors working for Mueller in recent months have questioned numerous White House officials about how the release came together — and about how directly Trump oversaw the process. Mueller’s team recently notified Trump’s lawyers that the Air Force One statement is one of about a dozen subjects that prosecutors want to discuss in a face-to-face interview of Trump that is still being negotiated.
The revelation of the meeting was striking: It placed the president’s son and his top campaign officials in direct contact with a Russian lawyer who promised damaging information on Clinton, and an email to the president’s son emerged saying that the information was part of Russia’s effort to help the Trump campaign. The special counsel is investigating how those revelations were handled in real time in part because the president was involved in his administration’s response.
Prosecutor interviews
What is already clear is that, as Trump’s aides and family members tried over 48 hours to manage one of most consequential crises of the young administration, the situation quickly degenerated into something of a circular firing squad.
The latest witness to be called for an interview about the episode was Mark Corallo, who served as a spokesman for Trump’s legal team before resigning in July. Corallo received an interview request last week from the special counsel and has agreed to the interview, according to three people with knowledge of the request.
Corallo is planning to tell Mueller about a previously undisclosed conference call with Trump and Hope Hicks, the White House communications director, according to the three people. Corallo planned to tell investigators that Hicks said during the call that emails written by Donald Trump Jr. before the Trump Tower meeting — in which the younger Trump said he was eager to receive political dirt about Clinton from the Russians — “will never get out.” That left Corallo with concerns that Hicks could be contemplating obstructing justice, the people said.
In a statement on Wednesday, a lawyer for Hicks strongly denied Corallo’s allegations.
“She never said that. And the idea that Hope Hicks ever suggested that emails or other documents would be concealed or destroyed is completely false,” said the lawyer, Robert P. Trout.
Early on the morning of Friday, July 7, reporters from the Times approached White House officials and lawyers with questions about the Trump Tower meeting with a number of Russians a year earlier. The reporters eventually had to submit a list of 14 questions about that meeting.
The senior Donald Trump’s aides received the list midflight and began writing a response. In the plane’s front cabin, Trump huddled with Hicks. During the meeting, according to people familiar with the episode, Hicks was sending frequent text messages to Donald Trump Jr., who was in New York. Alan Garten, a lawyer for the younger Trump who was also in New York, was also messaging the White House advisers aboard the plane.
The president supervised the writing of the statement, according to three people familiar with the episode, with input from other White House aides. The senior Trump was insistent about including language that the meeting was about Russian adoptions, according to two people with knowledge of the discussion.
Competing statements
Nearly four hours later, the statement that had been cobbled together aboard Air Force One was sent to the Times. The statement was in Donald Trump Jr.’s name and was issued by Garten.
“It was a short introductory meeting,” it read. “I asked Jared (Kushner) and Paul (Manafort) to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at that time and there was no follow up.”
The Times published its story about the Trump Tower meeting, with the statement, at 5 p.m. Not long after, the news site Circa published a different version, saying that the June 2016 meeting had been set up “to discuss a Russian policy.”
Corallo, the spokesman for the legal team, said in the Circa story that the Russians had “misrepresented who they were and who they worked for.” Corallo suggested that the meeting might have been set up by Democratic operatives. He, along with the rest of the president’s legal team, was not consulted about Donald Trump Jr.’s earlier statement.
The dueling statements, both of which withheld the true purpose of the meeting, created tension at the White House.
Accusations began flying that the botched response made an already bad situation worse. Hicks called Corallo from Air Force One, according to three people who relayed his version of events to the Times. She accused him of trafficking in conspiracy theories.
A conference call with the president, Corallo and Hicks was arranged the next morning, and what transpired on the call is a matter of dispute.
In Corallo’s account, — he told both Trump and Hicks that the statement drafted aboard Air Force One would backfire because documents would eventually surface showing that the meeting had been set up for the Trump campaign to get political dirt about Clinton from the Russians.
According to his account, Hicks responded that the emails “will never get out” because only a few people had access to them. Corallo, who worked as a Justice Department spokesman during the George W. Bush administration, told colleagues he was alarmed not only by what Hicks had said but also that she had said it in front of the president without a lawyer on the phone and that the conversation could not be protected by attorney-client privilege.
Contacted on Wednesday, Corallo said he did not dispute any of the account shared by his colleagues but declined to elaborate further.
When the president began questioning Corallo about the nature of the documents, Corallo cut off the conversation and urged the president to continue the discussion with his lawyers.
Corallo left the job shortly after the phone call.