Donald Trump Jr.’s interview with Laura Ingraham appeared to be interrupted by a well-timed technological problem on Monday when the Fox News personality asked President Trump’s eldest son about contradictory reports regarding the controversial June 2016 Trump Tower meeting.
“You want any comments on that Donnie because they’re hitting you on that for contradictions. I mean, they’re calling it worse than contradictions obviously,” Ingraham started, referring to liberal lawmakers and pundits.
“Hello?” Trump Jr. responds, before Ingraham asks her question again.
The pair were eventually reconnected for Trump Jr. to cast blame on Democrats and liberal news outlets for blowing the meeting between key Trump campaign officials and a Kremlin-linked lawyer by the name of Natalia Veselnitskaya out of proportion.
“It was a 20-minute meeting. It ended up being about essentially nothing that was relevant to any of these things. That’s all it is and that’s all they’ve got,” Trump Jr. said, adding that the conversation was primarily about Russian adoptions, despite the meeting being pitched as a way to convey political dirt about Hillary Clinton.
Trump on Sunday blasted reports he was concerned about the potential legal exposure of his “wonderful” son Donald Trump Jr. amid special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, which is probing the Trump campaign’s foreign contacts.
[More: Trump reasserts: I was not aware of Don Jr. meeting with Russians]
“Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics – and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!”
Trump Jr. told the Senate Intelligence Committee in a December closed-door hearing that his father was never advised about the arrangement, according to transcripts released by the panel in May. But Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen reportedly alleges that the president knew in advance and approved of the discussions before they took place, according to CNN.
Listen to the interview below:
