Trump says Don Jr. wanted dirt on Clinton from Russian lawyer
Donald Trump acknowledged Sunday that his oldest son was trying to dig up dirt on Hillary Clinton when he met a woman linked to the Kremlin in 2016 — an attempt to recast the Trump Tower meeting as an innocuous part of campaigning as the president gets energized about hitting the trail again this year.
His comments, delivered by tweet, directly contradicted a July 2017 statement in which Trump’s team claimed the purpose of Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting a year earlier was to discuss adoption policy regarding Russian children.
That meeting has become one focus of Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia in its efforts to interfere in the 2016 election — a probe the president and his allies have grown more and more eager to put behind him so that he can get back to holding campaign-style rallies in states like Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
“This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics - and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!” Trump said in one tweet Sunday morning.
Republicans close to the White House say Trump is not so worried about the potential legal case surrounding his son as much as he is concerned about his own political fate, particularly with November’s midterm elections approaching. He plans to campaign several times a week after Labor Day for various vulnerable Republican candidates.
Lately, Trump has expressed frustration to close White House allies because he thinks he is not receiving enough credit from the media for the strong economy and low unemployment rate, what he sees as a good relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, or his recent meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
“I love it because we are doing things that are historic,” Trump told supporters at Thursday’s rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where he touted the unemployment rate, repealing the individual mandate of Obamacare and pulling out of the Paris climate deal as some of his key accomplishments.
Two close White House advisers said that in recent days, Trump did not seem like a man under siege over the Russia investigation, even as his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, faces the first of two trials stemming from Mueller’s probe.
One senior administration official said that while the stated promise of the June 2016 meeting was opposition research on Clinton, the meeting itself touched on Russian adoptions and did not necessarily deal with opposition research, adding that the Trump campaign did not need a meeting like that to win in 2016.
A person close to Donald Trump Jr. said he is not concerned because he believes he did nothing wrong.
A White House spokesperson directed any inquiries about Trump’s Sunday tweets and the Mueller investigation to the president’s outside legal team.
Jay Sekulow, one of Trump’s attorneys, said Sunday that he made a mistake last year in saying that Trump was not involved in crafting the initial, misleading statement that said Trump Jr. intended to discuss adoption policy when he met Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower. The president was later revealed to have been involved in writing that initial response.
“I had bad information at that time,” Sekulow said on ABC’s “This Week.” “I’ve talked about that before. That happens when you have cases like this.”
Trump’s complete reversal of that first statement comes as one of his other lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, appears to be trying out a new legal strategy by arguing that collusion is not a crime.
The White House has maintained, however, that Trump did not know of the gathering in his building — which also included Manafort and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner — before it occurred. And White House allies remain optimistic that the Mueller investigation will wrap up by Labor Day, hoping that the continued trickle of information will not cloud the midterms.
“Trump did not know about the meeting, and he had nothing to do with it,” said one Republican close to the White House. “We’re 20 months into an administration that’s been under investigation for months by the Mueller team. That team has not demonstrated any evidence that Trump or the campaign coordinated with Russia. It’s time to end the investigation. It’s the proverbial cloud hanging over something when it shouldn’t be.”