White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Tuesday that President Trump helped his son, Donald Trump Jr., write a statement explaining a meeting he had last year at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer.
The Washington Post reported that the president was involved in writing that “misleading” statement, but Sanders said the statement is true.
“The statement that Don Jr. issued is true. There’s no inaccuracy in the statement,” Sanders said Tuesday. “The president weighed in as any father would based on the limited information that he had. This is all discussion of no consequence.”
The Post reported Monday night that Trump personally dictated the statement from his son, which said the 2016 meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was related to a ban on adoptions by American families of Russian children.
But Sanders said Trump “certainly didn’t dictate,” and only “weighed in.”
Trump Jr.’s statement was called into question after it was revealed the president’s son decided to meet with Veselnitskaya after he was promised damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Also in attendance at the June 2016 meeting were former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.
Lawyers for Trump have in the past refuted any notion that the president was involved in the drafting of Trump Jr.’s statement.
“I do want to be clear the president was not involved in the drafting of the statement and did not issue the statement. It came from Donald Trump Jr., so that’s what I can tell you because that’s what we know,” Jay Sekulow, a member of the president’s outside legal team, told NBC News last month.
During the press briefing Tuesday, Sanders placed blame on Democrats for continuing to push stories about the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and said the American people are not interested in the probe, which Trump has described as a “witch hunt” and “fake news.”
“Democrats want to continue to use this as a PR stunt and are doing everything they can to keep this story alive and in the papers every single day,” Sanders said. “The American people, they voted America first and not Russia first, and that’s the focus of the administration.”
Sanders also accused the press of misleading the public by continuing to push the narrative that the president and his campaign colluded with Russia.
“The only thing I see as misleading is a year’s worth of stories that have been the fueling false narrative about this Russia collusion, a phony scandal based on anonymous sources,” she said. “If we want to talk about misleading, that’s the only thing that’s misleading in this entire process.”
