President says Donald Trump Jr. is ‘open, transparent and innocent’

WASHINGTON: President Trump on Wednesday stepped up his defence of his eldest son days after revelations surfaced regarding Donald Trump Jr.’s arrangement of a 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer said to have damaging information on Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Taking to Twitter early in the morning, the president praised Trump Jr.’s performance Tuesday night during a Fox News interview in which he sought to downplay the significance of an email exchange before the meeting in which he welcomed the assistance of a “Russian government attorney.”

“My son Donald did a good job last night,” the president wrote of his son’s appearance with Fox News host Sean Hannity. “He was open, transparent and innocent. This is the greatest Witch Hunt in political history. Sad!”

.@jessebwatters on @DonaldJTrumpJr meeting with Russian attorney: “I believe Don Jr. is the victim here.” #TheFive — Fox News (@FoxNews) July 12, 2017

Earlier, Trump retweeted the assessment of another Fox News host, Jesse Watters, who wrote that Trump Jr. was “the victim” in the episode.

Trump remained silent over the weekend as news initially broke about the encounter with the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, who on Tuesday said she had not sought the meeting on behalf of the Kremlin and was interested in a different subject altogether: Russian adoptions.

Earlier Tuesday, as the New York Times was preparing to publish another story on the episode, Trump Jr. made public an email exchange in which he was told by an intermediary that the “high level” information he would be offered about Clinton was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump” and would be “highly useful for your father.”

The younger Trump appeared to relish the opportunity. “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” he wrote back.

Trump on Tuesday offered only a brief defence of his son, with deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders reading a statement from the president in which he said Trump Jr. “is a high-quality person and I applaud his transparency.”

Later Tuesday, Trump tweeted to his 33.7 million Twitter followers that they should watch Donald Jr.’s interview on “Hannity.”

During the interview, Trump Jr. said that the meeting came when “things are going a million miles per hour” in the campaign and that nothing concrete resulted.

“In retrospect I probably would have done things a little differently,” Trump Jr. said, adding: “For me, this was opposition research. They had something, you know, maybe concrete evidence to all the stories I’d been hearing about, probably underreported for years, not just during the campaign, so I think I wanted to hear it out.”

Trump Jr. said there was no more to the meeting than a “wasted” 20 minutes.

“There isn’t anything else,” he said, promising his team had scoured his emails and no other similar documents will emerge.

The president also tweeted a warning Tuesday morning about the media.

“Remember, when you hear the words ‘sources say’ from the Fake Media, often times those sources are made up and do not exist,” Trump wrote.

The revelation puts the president’s son at the center of a burgeoning scandal involving multiple US investigations into whether Trump associates colluded with Moscow in its efforts to tilt the 2016 election in the Republican’s favour.

The email chain was released in its entirety by Trump Jr in a move that jolted Washington, and added fuel to the firestorm swirling over allegations that Trump’s campaign team colluded with Moscow to influence the 2016 election.

Speaking to Fox News, Trump Jr said he didn’t tell his father about the meeting after it failed to yield compromising information about his election rival Clinton.

“It was such a nothing. There was nothing to tell,” he said, while appearing to acknowledge the misstep.

US intelligence agencies concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin approved a mass effort to tilt the election in Trump’s favour, including hacking and leaking embarrassing emails from Democrats.

The latest disclosure now thrusts the president’s son to the center of multiple investigations by Congress and the FBI as to whether Trump’s team was in the know.

In a statement accompanying the emails, Trump Jr said he believed Veselnitskaya, “as she has said publicly, was not a government official.”

Speaking to Fox, he said: “We didn’t know who she was before the meeting.”

Veselnitskaya is referred to in the exchange as “the Russian government attorney.”

However, Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, two of Trump’s most trusted campaign officials, attended the meeting.

In an interview with CNN late on Tuesday, the president’s lawyer Jay Sekulow stressed that Trump had not been aware of his son’s meeting with Veselnitskaya until “very recently” and did not know about the emails.

“The president, by the way, never saw an email — did not see the email — until it was seen today,” Sekulow said.

“I want to be clear on that.”

In an interview with NBC News, Veselnitskaya said: “It’s possible that maybe they were looking for such information” about the Clinton campaign.

“They wanted it so badly.”

Clinton’s vice presidential running mate Tim Kaine described the revelations as moving toward more serious charges of perjury and “potentially treason.”

“This should have set off alarm bells and red lights and instead, what it seemed to do is it activated their salivary glands,” Kaine, a US senator, told MSNBC.

— Agencies