Donald Trump Jr. said Tuesday that he never informed his father about a meeting he attended in June 2016 with a Russian lawyer who promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton.
“It was just a nothing. There was nothing to tell,” Trump Jr. told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Tuesday. “I mean, 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.”
While the news has again shaken up the Trump administration, the president tweeted just hours before the broadcast that Trump Jr. is a “great person who loves our country!”
My son, Donald, will be interviewed by @seanhannity tonight at 10:00 P.M. He is a great person who loves our country!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 12, 2017
Trump Jr. accepted a meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian attorney, after an intermediary suggested Veselnitskaya had “sensitive” information about Clinton gathered through the Kremlin’s efforts to boost then-candidate Donald Trump.
The president’s eldest son published four pages of emails on Tuesday that shed light on how he, Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner ended up in a meeting at Trump Tower last summer with a Russian lawyer. Neither Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, nor Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, have spoken out about the meeting, which Trump Jr. said ultimately focused on adoptions.
“In retrospect, I probably would have done things a little differently,” Trump Jr. said Tuesday in his interview with Hannity, which will air in full at 10 p.m. ET. “Again, this is before the Russia mania, this is before they were building this up in the press. For me this was opposition research, they had something, you know, maybe concrete evidence to all the stories I’d been hearing about, probably under-reported for years not just during the campaign so I think I wanted to hear it out. But really it went nowhere and it was apparent that wasn’t what the meeting was about.”
The White House declined to answer questions Tuesday about when and how the president learned about Trump Jr.’s activities, although deputy press secretary Sarah Sanders described Trump’s reaction as “frustrated” upon hearing about how the meeting had come to light.
