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| (Stephanie Keith/Reuters) |
The New York Times reported on the front page of Sunday’s paper that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort sat down with a Russian lawyer who has ties to the Kremlin last June.
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| AP Photo On “ Fox News Sunday,” White House chief of staff ReincePriebus dismissed the meeting as “a big nothing burger” that was about adoption and not at all out of the ordinary. “Talking about issues of foreign policy, issues related to our place in the world (or) issues important to the American people is not unusual,” he told Chris Wallace. |
But just a few hours later, the president’s son acknowledged that he had actually agreed to meet with the Russian lawyer because she claimed she could provide potentially damaging information about Hillary Clinton. In a statement, Donald Jr. said he met with her at the request of an acquaintance. “After pleasantries were exchanged,” he said, “the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.” He said that’s when she turned the conversation to adoption of Russian children and the Magnitsky Act, an American law that blacklists suspected Russian human rights abusers. “It became clear to me that this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting,” he said.
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| Natalia Veselnitskaya The New York Times’ Jo Becker, Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman reported last night: “It is unclear whether the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, actually produced the promised compromising information … But [the people interviewed] said the expectation was that she would do so. [The meeting] represents the first public indication that at least some in the campaign were willing to accept Russian help.” A spokesman for Donald Trump’s personal lawyer claims the president was unaware of the meeting. |
-- Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger scoop who set up the meeting: Donald Jr. said Sunday that he was approached about the meeting by “an acquaintance” he knew from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant. In an interview Sunday, Rob Goldstone, a music publicist who is friendly with Donald Jr., told The Post that he had arranged the meeting at request of a Russian client and had attended it along with Veselnitskaya.
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| President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, also attended the meeting last year at Trump Tower.Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
-- Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, said he wants to question “everyone that was at that meeting.” “There’s no reason for this Russian government advocate to be meeting with Paul Manafort or with Mr. Kushner or the president’s son if it wasn’t about the campaign and Russia policy,” he said.
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-- A former White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush said what happened “borders on treason.” “This was an effort to get opposition research on an opponent in an American political campaign from the Russians,” Richard Painter said on MSNBC. “We do not get our opposition research from spies, we do not collaborate with Russian spies.” Painter said the Bush administration would not have allowed the meeting to happen. “If this story is true, we’d have one of them if not both of them in custody by now, and we’d be asking them a lot of questions. ... This is unacceptable ...This borders on treason, if it is not itself treason.”
-- “Trump Jr. confirmed that he went into the meeting expecting to receive information from the Russian lawyer that could hurt Clinton. That is a breathtaking admission,” Callum Borchers writes on The Fix. “The rest of Trump Jr.’s statement is an attempt to minimize the value of what the lawyer actually told him. ...
-- “The Trump Administration should not win any moral or political plaudits even if it turns out, in the end, that there was no collusion between the President’s campaign and the Russian government,” the New Yorker’s David Remnick writes. “Its countless sins of lying, conflict of interest, shady business transactions, character assassination, and so much else assures it a place in history as a uniquely grimy Administration. And we are not yet a half year into its reign ... For now, we live in a moment when the President of the United States is, without shame, trying to intimidate the people whose business it is to come to an honest reckoning. He tries to intimidate the press. He has fired an F.B.I. director and considered going further. It’s reasonable to wonder why.”