ADVERTISEMENT

Trump Jr. Says He Didn't Tell His Dad Before Meeting Russians

Trump Jr. says he didn’t tell his father before meeting with Russians.

Trump Jr. Says He Didn't Tell His Dad Before Meeting Russians
Donald Trump Jr., son of U.S. President Donald Trump and executive vice president of Trump Organization Inc., in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. (Photographer: Ben Nelms/Bloomberg)

(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump Jr. said he didn’t tell his father before a 2016 meeting with Russians who promised to deliver damaging information about Hillary Clinton, according to transcripts of interviews released Wednesday by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“I did not collude with any foreign government and do not know of anyone who did,” the president’s son also said in the interview with the committee’s staff on Sept. 7, 2017. He said he was skeptical about the value of such a meeting and “as it later turned out, my skepticism was justified.”

Trump Jr. said Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya told him only “very generally about individuals connected to Russia supporting or funding Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton or the Democratic National Committee.”

This marks the first time that Trump Jr.’s full account of what unfolded has been made public. Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley had announced in January he would release the transcripts of the private staff interview with Trump Jr. and others who attended the meeting.

Collusion Questions

As soon as reports of the June 2016 meeting surfaced last summer, it became the focus of questions about possible collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russian efforts to meddle in the election, issues under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Even Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee who staunchly rejected that portrayal have criticized the decision to take the meeting as poor judgment.

“I appreciate the opportunity to have assisted the Judiciary Committee in its inquiry," Trump Jr. said Wednesday in a statement released by a spokesman. "The public can now see that for over five hours I answered every question asked and was candid and forthright with the committee."

About 2,500 pages of documents were released on Wednesday, including the interviews with Trump Jr. and Rob Goldstone, a music publicist who arranged the meeting and said in text messages it was part of a Russian government effort to aid the Trump campaign. Among those attending was lobbyist and former Soviet counterintelligence officer Rinat Akhmetshin.

Akhmetshin told Senate interviewers that Trump Jr. led the meeting, saying, “He was definitely in charge.” After small talk about the view from Trump Tower and recent presidential primaries, the younger Trump got down to business, Akhmetshin said, telling the Russian visitors, “So I believe you have some information for us.”

‘Fairly Jumbled’

The younger Trump said the Russian visitors briefly indicated that some “business people who were supporters of the DNC and perhaps Hillary Clinton were in some sort of tax scheme to avoid paying taxes in both the United States and Russia."

But he said “it was fairly jumbled and it didn’t really seem all that relevant to me.” From there, he said. the discussion turned to Russian complaints about the Magnitsky Act, which sanctions Russians for human-rights violations, and a ban Russia imposed in response on American adoptions of Russian children.

Trump Jr. said at the end of the 20-minute meeting that the adoption issue would be revisited if his father became president, Anatoli Samochornov, who served as translator at the meeting for Veselnitskaya, told the Senate committee staff.

After news of the Trump Tower meeting became public in July 2017, Goldstone, the music promoter, wrote to Emin Agalarov -- the pop singer son of Russian real estate developer Aras Agalarov, who had recruited him to arrange the meeting -- saying, “I hope this favor was worth it for your dad -- it could blow up big.”

Manafort and Kushner

Others attending the meeting were Paul Manafort, then the chairman of Trump’s presidential campaign; Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner; and Ike Kaveladze, a California businessman who was born in Russia.

Kushner, who Grassley previously said had been "spooked" out of testifying, and Manafort, who has since been indicted on money laundering and assorted other charges, didn’t appear before the committee.

Kushner did provide the panel with a 12-page statement, also released by Grassley.

The Trump campaign has dismissed the meeting as part of a bait-and-switch Russian lobbying effort to amend the Magnitsky Act.

Last July, when the New York Times published a report about the meeting, a statement was crafted aboard Air Force One as the president returned from Germany.

The statement’s assertion that the meeting primarily concerned Russian adoptions turned out to be false when emails revealed that Trump Jr. had agreed to the meeting after being offered damaging information on Clinton.

Last December, Trump Jr. told House lawmakers that he couldn’t answer questions about what he told his father after the meeting, citing attorney-client privilege, Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said afterward.

Schiff said Trump Jr. invoked the privilege because his lawyers claimed that the discussion with his father took place in the presence of legal counsel, which Schiff and other Democrats argued is a situation not covered by the privilege.

Trump Jr. also met behind closed doors with the Senate Intelligence Committee.

--With assistance from Vernon Silver Caleb Melby and Saleha Mohsin

To contact the reporters on this story: Steven T. Dennis in Washington at sdennis17@bloomberg.net, Billy House in Washington at bhouse5@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kevin Whitelaw at kwhitelaw@bloomberg.net, Larry Liebert, Laurie Asséo

©2018 Bloomberg L.P.