Getty Donald Trump stands with his son Donald Trump Jr. after the first presidential debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York on September 26, 2016.
Amid another finding in Donald Trump‘s presidential campaigns’ ties to Russia, the president issued a statement commending his son, Donald Jr., for being open about the latest reports.
“My son is a high-quality person and I applaud his transparency,” Trump said of his oldest son just hours after he released a strand of emails regarding a meeting with a Russian lawyer.
The report, which surfaced over the weekend, alleged that Trump Jr. believed that Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya would offer him “compromising information” about Hillary Clinton in an arranged meeting in June 2016, the New York Times reported.
According to The Times report, Trump Jr. was informed via email that Veselnitskaya would give him information that would aid his father’s presidential campaign against Clinton. The email was sent by Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former reporter for British tabloids.
Once the allegations surfaced, Trump Jr. tweeted out pages of emails that he says document the conversations that were had between all the parties prior to the meeting.
Here’s my statement and the full email chain
Here is page 4 (which did not post due to space constraints).
The email exchange showed that Trump Jr. knew that he was using the meeting as an opportunity to get information directly from the Russian government and is some of the most concrete evidence showing campaign ties to the foreign nation to date.
When questioned about the reports and Trump Jr. releasing the email, White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that she was unaware when Trump and his son last spoke and issued the president’s brief statement on the matter. After that, she refused to take any further questions on the report and referred any other inquiries to Trump Jr. and his legal team.
Listen to the audio from the July 11 press briefing below:
Sanders took no further questions about Trump Jr. t.co/H1DA6IqQld
Also in the off-camera briefing, Sanders said that Trump is growing more frustrated that Russia “continues to be an issue,” saying that the president would rather focus on other things such as tax reform.
Congress and an independent counsel are investigating Russian interference into the presidential campaign and alleged that the Trump campaign colluded with the nation, though Trump has repeatedly and strongly denied the accusation.
After the latest report about the meeting came out, Democrats were all over it. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, said that everyone who was part of the meeting must be “immediately summoned” to testify under oath.
“There’s no escaping it: the Trump Campaign’s inner circle met with an agent of a hostile foreign power to influence the outcome of the American election,” Pelosi said in a statement. “The American people face a White House riddled with shadowy Russian connections and desperate to hide the truth.”
