The FINANCIAL — Donald Trump Jr., U.S. President Donald Trump’s eldest son, has said that his meeting with a Russian lawyer did not yield anything useful to his father’s presidential campaign and that he never told his father about it.
In an interview late on July 11 with Fox News, Trump acknowledged that he “has probably met with other people from Russia” besides lawyer Natalya Veselnitskaya, whom he met with in June 2016 after being told that the meeting was part of a Russian-government effort to help his father’s candidacy.
But he insisted that he did not attempt to coordinate with them to affect the election or try to damage his father’s Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Trump said he didn’t tell his father about the meeting with Veselnitskaya because “there was nothing to tell.”
“It was literally just a wasted 20 minutes,” he said. “For me, this was opposition research” that he hoped might yield “concrete evidence” against Clinton.
“In retrospect I probably would have done things a little differently,” he said.
Some members of Congress charged that the Veselnitskaya meeting, as related in e-mails released by Trump himself on July 11, amounted to “collusion” with Russia, according to RFE/RL.
Democratic Senator Ron Wyden said the e-mails show Trump’s son “sought to collude with a hostile foreign power to subvert America’s democracy.”
Trump called those allegations “ridiculous” and “overplayed.”
In a post on Twitter on July 11, President Trump described his son as “a great person who loves our country.”
Republicans in the Senate were more subdued. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he would wait forSenate investigation to “get to the bottom of whatever happened.” Senator Susan Collins (Republican-Maine), a member of the Intelligence Committee, said the latest e-mail revelations were “only part of the picture.”
The Veselnitskaya meeting, and the e-mails, add to the evidence pointing to some sort of active Russian effort to meddle in the U.S. campaign. In January, the U.S. intelligence community released a report that outright accused Moscow of waging a cyber-and-propaganda effort to interfere in the election.
Since that time, multiple congressional committees have opened investigations into the question of Russian meddling.
The FBI, meanwhile, opened a criminal probe back in July into whether Trump associates — including Manafort — had improper interactions with Russian officials.
But the man overseeing that investigation, James Comey, was fired in May by Trump, who later reportedly bragged to Russian officials that his firing had relieved “great pressure” on him about the Russian probe.
The uproar that ensued ultimately led to the Justice Department appointing a special counsel to oversee the criminal investigation.
Alan Futerfas, a lawyer for Trump Jr., issued a statement on July 10 saying his client did nothing wrong and had promised to cooperate with investigators.
With reporting by AP, AFP, The New York Times, Reuters, and Fox News
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