President Donald Trump declared on Wednesday that his eldest son was “open, transparent and innocent”, a day after Donald Trump Jr. revealed his eagerness to hear damaging information about Hillary Clinton from the Russian government in a meeting last year with an attorney from Moscow.
Defending his son’s conduct, the President again dismissed the ongoing Russia investigation as the “greatest Witch Hunt in political history”. Mr. Trump responded after Donald Trump Jr. disclosed a series of emails on Tuesday that marked the clearest sign to date that Mr. Trump’s campaign was willing to consider election help from a long-time U.S. adversary.
The email exchange posted to Twitter by Donald Trump Jr. showed him conversing with a music publicist who wanted him to meet with a “Russian government attorney” who supposedly had dirt on Ms. Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump”. The messages reveal that Mr. Trump Jr. was told the Russian government had information that could “incriminate” Ms. Clinton and her dealings with Russia.
“I love it,” Mr. Trump Jr. said in one email response.
The President’s attorney, Jay Sekulow, said in an interview with NBC’s Today that Mr. Trump Jr. did not violate any laws by accepting the meeting. He said the President had not been aware of Mr. Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting and didn’t find out about his son’s email exchange until “very recently”.
Mr. Sekulow said the President was not being investigated by former FBI Director Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating the Trump campaign and its interaction with Russia during the election. “I would know a little bit about it. I’m one of the lawyers,” Mr. Sekulow told ABC’s Good Morning America.
As the emails reverberated across the political world, Mr. Trump Jr. defended his actions in an interview with Fox News, blaming the decision to take the meeting on the “million miles per hour” pace of a presidential campaign and his suspicion that the lawyer might have information about “under-reported” scandals involving Ms. Clinton. Mr. Trump Jr. said the meeting “really went nowhere” and that he never told his father about it because there was “nothing to tell”. “In retrospect, I probably would have done things a little differently,” Mr. Trump Jr. said.
Voicing outrage
Democrats in Congress voiced outrage and insisted the messages showed clear collusion, with California Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, declaring that “all of the campaign’s previous denials obviously now have to be viewed in a different context.”
Yet Republicans who stand the most to lose politically from Mr. Trump’s Russia ordeal did not join in the condemnation. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he was confident Senate investigators would “get to the bottom of whatever happened”. And Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican on the intelligence committee, cautioned that the emails were “only part of the picture.”