In a newly released transcript of Donald Trump Jr's testimony, the
eldest of President Trump's children details what happened in that Trump
Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer. Nathan Rousseau Smith has the
story.
Buzz60
WASHINGTON —
After setting up a meeting with Russian agents to discuss what he
thought would be incriminating information on Hillary Clinton in June
2016, Donald Trump Jr. made an 11-minute phone call to a blocked phone
number, according to a transcript of his interview with Senate investigators released Wednesday.
Trump
Jr. says he can't remember who he spoke to that night. But his father,
now President Trump, used a blocked phone number at his home at the
time, according to former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
At a rally the next day, the presidential candidate alluded to information his campaign was gathering on Hillary Clinton.
He said he was planning to give a “major speech” the following week
“discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons,"
he said.
“I think you’re going to find it very
informative and very, very interesting,” Trump said. “I wonder if the
press will want to attend, who knows.”
Whether or
not President Trump knew about his son's meeting with Russians is one of
the central unanswered questions in a wide-ranging investigations into
possible Russian collusion in the 2016 presidential election.
Interviews
with the Senate Judiciary Committee could not answer that question
conclusively, as Trump Jr. said he couldn't remember whether he talked
to his father about it.
But the documents released Wednesday laid out in greater detail the potentially damaging information Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya was shopping to the Trump campaign at the meeting.
Rinat
Akhmetshin, a Russian lobbyist who attended the meeting, told the
committee Veselnitskaya wanted to discuss an alleged $880 million tax
scheme involving investors who also contributed to the Democratic
National Committee or the Clinton campaign.
The meeting offer came from Rob Goldstone, a music publicist who represented Russian singer Emin Agalarov.
Goldstone
promised Trump Jr. "official documents and information that would
incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very
useful to your father," according to emails obtained by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
"If it's what you say I love it especially later in the summer," Trump Jr. emailed back.
In
his closed-door Senate testimony, Trump Jr. explained what he meant by
that. "It was a colloquial term used to say, hey, great, thank you," he
said.
But ultimately, the June 9, 2016 meeting at
Trump Tower ended up being about the adoption of Russian children by
American couples, which the Russian government blocked in response to
U.S. sanctions passed by Congress in the Magnitsky Act.
Trump
Jr. and his brother-in-law — now White House senior adviser Jared
Kushner — were visibly annoyed by the discussion of the Magnitsky Act, Goldstone told the committee. He said that Kushner in particular was "agitated" and "infuriated"
But Trump Jr. told the committee he didn't regret taking the meeting.
"To
the extent that they had information concerning the fitness, character,
or qualifications of any presidential candidate, I believed that I
should at least hear them out," Trump Jr. said in his prepared testimony to the committee.
"The
meeting provided no meaningful information and turned out to be not
about what was represented. The meeting was instead primarily focused on
Russian adoptions, which is exactly what I said over a year later in my
statement of July 8, 2017," he said.
But that
statement — crafted in part by President Trump himself — neglected to
mention that he attended the meeting expecting to get damaging
information on Clinton.
Trump Jr. said he worked
with the White House to draft the statement, but that he communicated
through Hope Hicks, who was then the White House's director of strategic
communications.
"I never spoke to my father about
it," he said. "She asked if I wanted to actually speak to him, and I
chose not to because I didn't want to bring him into something that he
had nothing to do with."
The Senate Judiciary
Committee interviewed 12 people in its investigation of the Trump Tower
meeting, and Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, ordered the release of six
transcripts Wednesday. Two witnesses, Kushner and Trump campaign
chairman Paul Manafort, declined to testify.
Trump
Jr. said Wednesday that he cooperated fully with the investigation. "The
public can now see that for over five hours I answered every question
asked and was candid and forthright with the committee," he said in a
statement.
Credit: usatoday
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