Trump tackles Russian lawyer claims head on

Fox News national security strategist Sebastian Gorka reacts to media frenzy over Trump Tower meeting on ‘Hannity’.

Trump Jr went on to blame the Democrats and cable news outlets for blowing the meeting with the Kremlin-connected lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, out of proportion.

Trump Jr. initially responded to the first revelations about the meeting by releasing a misleading statement claiming the meeting primarily concerned Russian adoption policy. The statement soon proved to be incomplete. It was later revealed that Trump Jr. and others in the Trump campaign met with a Russian lawyer on the promise of receiving information damaging to Hillary Clinton. He went on to distance himself from Trump Jr. and the meeting: “I did not know about it!” However, he has contradicted this claim, also saying that the meeting was “opposition research”.

“The President has done nothing but help us prove the fact that this was a conspiracy”, he said.

Trump downplayed the meeting on July 13, 2017, saying most people would have taken the meeting.

Trump has launched a series of new public attacks on Mueller and his team in recent weeks, which has been interpreted as possible signs the president is anxious about the inquiry reaching his family.

He made similar comments in a tweet the same week.

The meeting, first reported by The New York Times, happened two weeks after Trump secured the Republican nomination.

Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos on “This Week” Sunday that he has no knowledge of the president’s son being a target of Mueller’s probe.

According to Sekulow, if Mueller subpoenas the president to testify before his investigators, the action will be fought ultimately before the Supreme Court of the United States.

Mr Trump’s lawyers argue that the meeting, in and of itself, violated no laws. “The president wasn’t involved in that”. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders later said that Trump had “weighed in” on the statement.

We have since learned that the elder Trump actually dictated that statement.

The federal tax and bank fraud charges Manafort faces are not related to the Trump campaign but Manafort’s close relations with Russians and a Kremlin-backed Ukrainian politician are under scrutiny in the trial. The Times published a copy of that letter in June.

From there, the case would end up bouncing around the courts, Sekulow said.

Trump did not know about the meeting..

The infamous meeting was thrust back into the spotlight last month after Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, alleged Trump approved the meeting.

But at the same time, he still suggested that the meeting was, in large part, about adoption. He said Mr. Trump continues to “cast doubt on whether he accepts the fundamental conclusion that Russian Federation intervened”.

President Trump’s other claim in his Sunday tweet – that he did not know about the Trump Tower meeting with the Russians – may also be exposed as a lie.

The first is that Trump appears to have broken some new ground here when it comes to admitting the true objective of the Trump Tower meeting with a Kremlin-aligned lawyer – and even further contradicted the initial statement he helped draft about it.

The Trump camp maintains that it doesn’t matter anyway, because information on Clinton was never delivered by the Russians, or received by the campaign, in the meeting.

The admission is a complete reversal from prior explanations of the meeting.