“Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That’s politics!” Trump said Monday on his Twitter account.
Trump has tried several times now to defuse the controversy over Donald Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya. The younger Trump agreed to the meeting after being told by an intermediary in an email chain she was a Russian government attorney who would give him material damaging Clinton to support Moscow’s effort to help Trump win the election.
The younger Trump said the lawyer had no information about Clinton and the meeting quickly ended.
President Trump has said he only learned of the meeting in the last week, a gathering at Trump Tower in New York that also was attended by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump’s then-campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and a long-time Russian-American lobbyist in Washington who was a one-time Soviet military officer.
But Senator Mark Warner, the leading Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, says that he finds it “unbelievable” that Trump was not told about the meeting a year ago.