Donald Trump Jr. said Tuesday he would be willing to testify under oath about his meeting with a Russian lawyer who offered compromising information about Hillary Clinton.
“And you have nothing to hide,” Fox News host Sean Hannity told Trump Jr. during an interview that aired Tuesday night. “That means you’ll testify under oath, all of that?”
“All of it,” Trump Jr. responded.
Lawmakers investigating Russian election meddling are expected to ask President Trump’s eldest son to testify about his June 2016 meeting with lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who has close ties to the Kremlin, The Hill reads.
Earlier, Trump Jr. said he was willing to cooperate with the probe, but had not said whether he would offer hist account under penalty of perjury.
A chain of emails Trump Jr. exchanged with an intermediary while setting up the meeting, which he disclosed Tuesday, clearly indicated he was eager to accept damaging information about this father’s campaign from Russia, a longtime U.S. adversary.
Moreover, Trump Jr. insisted he acted appropriately and that the meeting did not yield any dirt on Clinton, while also admitting to Hannity he would have handled the encounter differently.
“They had something — maybe concrete evidence to all the stories that I’d been hearing about, but they were probably underreported for years, not just during the campaign. So I think I wanted to hear it out,” he said.
However, President Trump’s eldest son said the meeting “went nowhere and it was apparent that that wasn’t what the meeting was actually about.”
“I wouldn’t have even remembered it until you started scouring through this stuff. It was literally just a wasted 20 minutes, which was a shame,” he said.
“In retrospect, I probably would have done things a little differently,” Trump Jr. told Hannity.
The comments Tuesday night were Trump Jr.’s first in-person explanation for meeting with Veselnitskaya, which was made public Saturday by The New York Times. In the interview, Trump Jr. sought to protect his father, saying he never told him about the meeting.
“There was nothing to tell,” he said.
White House officials say the president only learned of the meeting in the last few days. Democrats believe the emails amount to a smoking gun that proves Trump campaign officials colluded with the Russians in that effort.
Trump Jr., however, dismissed the notion the emails amounted to proof of collusion.
He cast the meeting as an effort to obtain useful “opposition research” for a ramshackle campaign on the cusp of securing the Republican presidential nomination. He indicated the information was about “some DNC donors may have dome something in Russia and they didn’t pay taxes.”
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