Donald Trump Jr. Downplays Trump Tower Meeting
CNN reported Monday that the president’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr. is now downplaying his June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, referring to it as a “bait and switch.”
During an interview with Laura Ingraham on The Laura Ingraham Show Monday morning, Donald Jr. attempted to minimize the magnitude and gravity of the infamous Trump Tower meeting between President Trump’s campaign aides and a Kremlin-linked attorney, claiming that the meeting “ended up being about essentially nothing that was relevant.”
These new comments come only a day after President Trump admitted that the purpose of the notorious meeting was to collect damaging information on his opponent Hillary Clinton from a foreign entity and did not, in fact, pertain to Russian adoption, contrary to the previous remarks of the president’s staffers and campaign aides.
On Sunday, the president tweeted, “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!”
Donald Trump Jr., however, kept insisting that the main and central focus of the June meeting was still about Russian adoptions during his Monday interview, although he did admit that the possibility of gaining damaging information on Clinton secured the meeting in the first place.
Donald Jr. told Ingraham that adoptions were “the primary thing that we had spoken about in the meeting.”
“You know that’s not the premise that got them in the room,” he continued, “and then they started it was essentially a bait and switch to talk about that, and everyone has basically said that in testimony already.”
Donald Jr. also made an effort to minimize the media attention surrounding the meeting in light of recent developments, going on to claim that the media is trying to detract from the president’s achievements.
Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower. 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!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 5, 2018
“That is, I guess, the ultimate distraction from what’s really going on in this country,” he said, “which is, you have a Republican president, a very conservative president, who is getting stuff done.”
“And they can’t handle that, he continued, “They will do anything they can to try to stop that, to try to block that, to try to prevent that from happening.”
Following his Sunday admission on Twitter, President Trump has since been urged by his top advisers to stop tweeting about the Trump Tower meeting. According to an anonymous source close to the White House, advisers warned the president that his tweets have been recently attracting too much attention to the June 2016 meeting.
