President Donald Trump has been conspicuously silent about the growing firestorm involving his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who is facing more revelations about a meeting he held during the height of the campaign with a Russian lawyer promising damaging information about Hillary Clinton, Politico reads.
Trump has been active on Twitter, but his messages have ranged from railing against Democrats to bringing the Olympics to Los Angeles to defending his daughter Ivanka’s role at the G-20. But there have been no tweets about Trump Jr.
As The New York Times dropped another report on Monday about the eldest son of the president — alleging that he was informed by email that the Clinton information was part of a Russian government effort to help his father — Trump’s legal team just reiterated that Trump himself was not a part of it, Politico reads.
“The President was not aware of and did not attend the meeting,” said Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Trump’s legal team.
Trump Jr., who has hired New York criminal defense attorney Alan Futerfas as his personal attorney for Russia-related matters, took to Twitter to defend himself on Tuesday morning.
“Media & Dems are extremely invested in the Russia story. If this nonsense meeting is all they have after a yr, I understand the desperation!” he wrote.
The president’s own silence is deepening the mystery around the latest twist in the long-running Russia scandal that has proved to be at the least a major distraction for the Trump White House and could pose a significant threat to his overall presidency.
Trump has long denied any collusion with Russia, dismissing such reports as “fake news” and a “hoax.” But the storyline that has engulfed his presidency since before he inherited the Oval Office has only gotten deeper and now puts his son in the center of it, at least for now.
“If that email is accurate, the description is accurate, it means that among the very first people, if not the first people of the public who would learn that the Russians were trying to help elect Donald Trump, were the Trump family itself,” Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN on Tuesday morning.
Trump Jr.’s meeting is “a very big deal,” he said. “This is a hostile foreign power offering to intervene to help elect someone president of the United States. Hard to imagine something more serious than that.”
The allies of the president’s are keeping distance between this furor and Trump as they forcefully defend his son, whom lawmakers have indicated should be brought in for interviews with the House and Senate Intelligence Committees investigating Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.
Deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday the president only learned of the meeting “in the last couple of days,” and Futerfas noted in a statement late Monday that “His father knew nothing about it.”
Trump Jr.’s narrative regarding the June 2016 meeting inside Trump Tower has evolved significantly since Saturday, when he said the meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya was largely about an adoption program, Politico roports.
By Sunday, he had acknowledged that he took the meeting — which was also attended by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort — because he was told Veselnitskaya, whose name he said he wasn’t given before they met, “might have information helpful to the campaign.”
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