A brand new bombshell New York Times report reveals that before he arranged to meet with a Kremlin-linked lawyer, Donald Trump Jr. received an email indicating that the Russians wanted to assist then-candidate Donald Trump in his campaign against Hillary Clinton. The Times sources on the story are “three people with knowledge of the email.
The NYT report says publicist and former British tabloid reporter Rob Goldstone was the one who sent the email and coordinated the meeting. In a statement on Sunday, Trump Jr. acknowledged that he went to the meeting in the interest of obtaining damaging info on Clinton but didn’t know the lawyer was connected to the Russians.
In the email, Goldstone was reportedly specific about the info’s Russian origin.
The report is careful to point out that the email did not elaborate on the “wider effort by Moscow to help the Trump campaign.”
There is no evidence to suggest that the promised damaging information was related to Russian government computer hacking that led to the release of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails. The meeting took place less than a week before it was widely reported that Russian hackers had infiltrated the committee’s servers.
Along with journalists, the Justice Department is likely also to be interested in the email’s contents should they be able to help it’s current investigation into what’s looking like clear collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was towing the line during a subsequent press briefing, saying, “The president’s campaign did not collude in any way. Don Jr. did not collude with anybody to influence the election. No one within the Trump campaign colluded in order to influence the election.”
In a series of tweets, the president’s son insisted he had done what anyone connected to a political campaign would have done — hear out potentially damaging information about an opponent. He maintained that his various statements about the meeting were not in conflict.
“Obviously I’m the first person on a campaign to ever take a meeting to hear info about an opponent… went nowhere but had to listen,” he wrote in one tweet. In another, he added, “No inconsistency in statements, meeting ended up being primarily about adoptions. In response to further Q’s I simply provided more details.”
Read The New York Times‘ full report here.
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