The House Intelligence Committee will investigate a June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Kremlin-linked lawyer, and plans to call those connected to the meeting to come before the panel, the committee’s top Democrat said Tuesday.
Trump Jr. was offered incriminating information on Hillary Clinton, which was described by an intermediary as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” in the lead-up to the encounter at Trump Tower. Trump Jr., former campaign manager Paul Manafort, and President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, now a White House senior adviser, attended the meeting.
“We’ll certainly want [Trump Jr.] to come in,” said California congressman Adam Schiff. “We’ll want everyone connected with this meeting to come in. We’ll want any documents that they may have.”
The House Intelligence Committee is probing Russian election interference, to include any potential links between Trump campaign officials and the Kremlin.
Schiff said that Trump Jr. violated “oaths of citizenship,” and that neither he nor the elder Trump reported the meeting to the FBI.
“This is obviously very significant, deeply disturbing, new, public information about direct contacts between the Russian government and its intermediaries, and the very center of the Trump family, campaign, and organization,” he told reporters.
The meeting could have been a “testing of the waters by the Russians to see whether the campaign would be receptive to their engagement and involvement in the presidential election,” Schiff said.
The offer of the information and eventual meeting came to Trump Jr. through former British tabloid reporter Rob Goldstone, who was acting as an intermediary for the Azerbaijani-Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov and his son, pop star Emin Agalarov. In his email exchange with Trump Jr., Goldstone mentioned a meeting between Aras and a top Russian government official who said he would furnish the Clinton-related information, per details provided to Goldstone by Emin. Goldstone offered Emin as a point of contact.
Aras Agalarov father worked with the elder Trump on the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in greater Moscow.
Schiff also expressed concern about whether the Kremlin has information they could hold over Trump’s head.
“The most serious risk to the country, I think, is that the Russians possess compromising information, what they call kompromat, that can influence this president’s conduct of American policy,” Schiff said. “The Russians know about this meeting.”
“The American people need to know that our president is acting on their behalf and not acting because he has a fear the Russians could disclose things that could harm him or his family,” he said.
