President Trump has told special counsel Robert Mueller that he had no advance knowledge of the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting that Donald Trump Jr. and other campaign officials had with Natalia Veselnitskaya, an attorney with ties to the Kremlin.
Trump made that assertion as part of his written response to questions from Mueller, who is investigating Trump’s alleged ties to Russia, according to CNN.
Trump also claimed he did not discuss WikiLeaks with his longtime associate Roger Stone, who has attracted attention from Mueller’s investigators after he seemed to anticipate the release of stolen emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta on the WikiLeaks website. Stone tweeted in 2016 that “it will soon the Podesta’s time in the barrel,” which he claims was referring to Podesta and his brother.
But Stone has rejected on multiple occasions that he knew about WikiLeaks actions ahead of the publication of Podesta’s emails, and has said the comments were based off his own investigation.
“I never discussed any of this with Donald Trump. It’s one of the questions that Mr. Mueller wants the president to answer — one of the written questions. I’m highly confident that his answer will be that he knew nothing about it. We just never discussed it,” Stone said in a recent interview with CNN.
Trump’s responses were described to CNN by a source familiar with the matter, although no direct quotes from Trump’s responses were provided in the story. The source emphasized that Trump had responded to the questions as best he could remember when he provided them to Mueller this month.
A spokesperson for Mueller declined to provide comment to CNN.
ABC News, who published a similar report after CNN, also reported that Trump was asked about the Republican Party’s decision to weaken language regarding aiding Ukraine amid Russian aggression. Trump reportedly told Mueller he was not involved in the change, just as he said when ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos asked him about the alteration in 2016.
Trump, who has condemned Mueller’s investigation and routinely calls it a “witch hunt,” told the Associated Press in 2017 he had “never heard of WikiLeaks” until the emails were released.
“When WikiLeaks came out … never heard of WikiLeaks, never heard of it,” Trump said at the time. “When WikiLeaks came out, all I was just saying is, ‘Well, look at all this information here, this is pretty good stuff.'”
Trump has previously denied that he had knowledge of his son’s meeting at Trump Tower where Donald Trump Jr. had been promised damaging information on Clinton.
Mueller’s team is investigating whether there were any connections between WikiLeaks and Trump associates ahead of the 2016 presidential election, as he examines Russian interference and whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin.
