US President Donald Trump appears to have changed his story about a 2016 meeting at New York’s Trump Tower that is pivotal to US special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, tweeting that his son met with a Kremlin-connected lawyer to collect information about his political opponent.
“Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower,” Trump wrote on Sunday. “This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics — and it went nowhere. I did not know about it.”
That is a different explanation than Trump gave 13 months ago, when a statement dictated by the president, but released under the name of Donald Trump Jr, read: “We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago.”
The misdirection came amid a series of searing tweets sent from his New Jersey golf club in which he tore into two of his favorite targets, the news media and Mueller’s ongoing investigation into possible links between the president’s campaign and Russia.
Donald Trump unleashed particular fury at reports that he was anxious about the Trump Tower meeting attended by Donald Trump Jr and other senior campaign officials.
The president’s critics immediately pounced on the new story, the latest of several versions of events about a meeting for which e-mails were discovered between the president’s eldest son and an intermediary from the Russian government offering damaging information about Trump’s opponent, former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Betraying no surprise or misgivings about the offer from a hostile foreign power, Trump Jr replied: “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”
Sunday’s tweet was the president’s clearest statement yet on the purpose of the meeting, which has become a focal point of Mueller’s investigation, even as the president and his lawyers have tried to downplay its significance and pummel the Mueller probe with attacks.
On Sunday, Donald Trump again suggested without evidence that Mueller was biased against him, declaring: “This is the most one sided Witch Hunt in the history of our country.”
As the president and his allies have tried to discredit the probe, a new talking point has emerged: that even if the meeting was held to collect damaging information, none was provided and “collusion” — Trump’s go-to description of what Mueller is investigating — never occurred.
“The question is what law, statute, or rule or regulation has been violated, and nobody has pointed to one,” Jay Sekulow, one of Donald Trump’s attorneys, said on ABC’s This Week.
However, legal experts have pointed out several possible criminal charges, including conspiracy against the US, and aiding and abetting a conspiracy.
Despite his public Twitter denial, the president has expressed worry that his son could face legal exposure even as he believes he did nothing wrong, said three people close to the White House and familiar with the president’s thinking, speaking on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.
Sekulow said that the public explanation for the meeting has changed, but that the White House has been very clear with the special counsel’s office, adding that he was not aware of Donald Trump Jr facing any legal exposure.
“I don’t represent Don Jr,” Sekulow said. “But I will tell you I have no knowledge at all of Don Jr being told that he’s a target of any investigation, and I have no knowledge of him being interviewed by the special counsel.”
A decision about whether the president sits for an interview with Mueller might also be made in the coming weeks, said former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is one of Donald Trump’s attorneys.
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