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Trump Says Son Is ‘Innocent’ Amid Reports of Russia Meeting With Glare on Trump Children, Political Gets Personal for President
(about 13 hours later)
WASHINGTON — After initially holding back, President Trump jumped to the defense of his son on Wednesday morning, denouncing reports about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer to gain incriminating information about Hillary Clinton as part of “the greatest witch hunt in political history.” WASHINGTON — In private, President Trump sometimes addresses his adult children as “baby,” a term of endearment tinged with a New Yorker’s wisecracking edge. And now that Mr. Trump’s babies have been swept into the vortex of his storm-tossed presidency, he is taking it personally.
The president fired off posts on Twitter insisting that his son was “innocent” of wrongdoing and embracing the theory that he may even have been “the victim” in the case. He assailed the use of anonymous sources in the reports, although in this instance the story was confirmed by emails released by Donald Trump Jr. The fierce criticism of a meeting between Mr. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and a Kremlin-linked lawyer in June 2016 has left the president by turns angry, defensive and protective but ultimately relieved that for now, the worst appears to be over, people who spoke to him said Wednesday.
“My son Donald did a good job last night,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter, referring to his son’s appearance Tuesday on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News. “He was open, transparent and innocent. This is the greatest Witch Hunt in political history. Sad!” For Mr. Trump, who has faced a barrage of questions about his own dealings with Russia, watching his closest family members come under harsh scrutiny for things they are accused of doing to help his presidential campaign has marked an uncomfortable turn in the foreign entanglement that has shadowed his presidency.
In another message, Mr. Trump added, “Remember, when you hear the words “sources say” from the Fake Media, often times those sources are made up and do not exist.” And he retweeted a Fox News Twitter message quoting one of the network’s commentators saying, “I believe Don Jr. is the victim here.” And in another post, he quoted The Washington Times as saying that “Democrats have willfully used Moscow disinformation to influence the presidential election against Donald Trump.” The latest disclosures also focused renewed attention on Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, who attended Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting last June with the Russian, Natalia Veselnitskaya. And they came on the heels of a much-criticized decision by his daughter Ivanka to sit in her father’s vacated chair at a summit meeting in Germany.
The Russian government weighed in on Wednesday as well, essentially mirroring the president’s argument that the American news media was fueling a fake scandal. On Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump discarded pleas from advisers to avoid wading into the tempest over Donald Trump Jr., and posted a fusillade of tweets defending him. He denounced reports of the meeting — to collect incriminating information about Hillary Clinton — as part of “the greatest Witch Hunt in political history” and even embraced the theory that his son might have been “the victim” in the case.
“You know, it was with amazement that I learned that a Russian lawyer is being accused of communicating with Trump within Trump’s jurisdiction,” Sergey V. Lavrov, the foreign minister, told reporters in Brussels at a news conference with his Belgian counterpart. “Basically, to me it looks like barbarism, because when someone is talking to a lawyer — what kind of a problem, what threat could this constitute for anyone?” “He was great,” Mr. Trump told people about his son’s appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program the previous evening.
Mr. Lavrov added: “It’s amazing how serious people are making a mountain out of a molehill, even though there may be no molehill in the first place.” By midday Wednesday, the mercurial president was telling friends and advisers that he believed the situation had improved. “I think this is getting better,” he said to one group of aides, hours before he was set to take off for a trip to France to mark Bastille Day.
Mr. Trump’s messages on Wednesday morning and late Tuesday represented a shift in strategy. He said nothing publicly about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with the Russian lawyer for days after it was first reported in The New York Times, and after the emails were released on Tuesday he issued only a tepid one-sentence statement through his White House spokeswoman calling his son a “high-quality person.” The Trump family, friends said, always draws closer under intense pressure. But Mr. Trump bridles at the idea that his children, who have not spent years in the public spotlight like him, are now facing unrelenting scrutiny over what he believes to be a manufactured scandal by the news media.
Advisers had urged him to avoid publicly commenting on the reports, but evidently he changed course as he watched coverage on cable television. While Donald Trump Jr. has been on the firing line, the meeting with Ms. Veselnitskaya could arguably be a bigger distraction for Mr. Kushner. As a senior adviser to the president, he is involved in several of the administration’s most sensitive foreign-policy issues, from China to the Middle East peace process. His involvement in the meeting led reporters to ask the White House whether he still held his security clearance.
Donald Trump Jr. released the emails after learning that The Times had them and was about to publish them. They show that he was approached by an intermediary in June 2016 as his father was wrapping up the Republican presidential nomination about meeting with a woman described as a Russian government lawyer who had information that would “incriminate Hillary.” Also under scrutiny is how forthcoming Mr. Kushner was with his father-in-law about the nature of the June meeting. He met with Mr. Trump to discuss the issue around the time the emails setting up the meeting were discovered, according to advisers to the White House, and Mr. Kushner updated his federal disclosure form to include Ms. Veselnitskaya’s name on a list of foreign contacts he was required to submit to the F.B.I. to obtain a security clearance.
The damaging information was “part of Russia and its government support for Mr. Trump,” the email to Donald Trump Jr. said. He responded, “If it’s what you say I love it.” Mr. Kushner supplemented the list of foreign contacts three times, adding more than 100 names, people close to him said.
Mr. Trump invited Jared Kushner, his brother-in-law and now a senior White House adviser, and Paul J. Manafort, the campaign chairman, to join him at the meeting with the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya. Mr. Kushner played down the significance of the meeting and omitted significant details, according to two people who were briefed on the exchange. They said Mr. Kushner informed the president that he had met with a Russian foreign national, and that while he had to report the name, it would not cause a problem for the administration.
Both Donald Trump Jr. and Ms. Veselnitskaya have said in recent days that no actual incriminating information about Mrs. Clinton was discussed during the meeting and that instead Ms. Veselnitskaya brought up American sanctions imposed on Russians accused of human rights abuses, a topic of great interest to the Kremlin. Another official said Mr. Kushner’s assurance to the president was based on the fact that nothing came of the June meeting.
In his interview with Mr. Hannity on Tuesday night, the younger Mr. Trump acknowledged regret about how he handled the situation. “In retrospect, I probably would have done things a little differently,” he said. “Again, this is before the Russia mania. This is before they were building it up in the press. For me, this was opposition research.” In an interview with Reuters, Mr. Trump said he had not been told last summer that his son was meeting with a Russian lawyer. “No, that I didn’t know until a couple of days ago when I heard about this,” he said.
Mr. Trump said he took the meeting as “a courtesy to an acquaintance” and that “I don’t even think my sirens went up or the antennas went up at this time,” even though the email said explicitly that it was part of a Russian government effort to help his father. Mr. Kushner, colleagues say, has kept up a regular work schedule, meeting on Wednesday with Gary D. Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council, to discuss the administration’s impending moves on trade. He is also in touch with Jason D. Greenblatt, Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy, who is in Israel for meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders. And next week, he plans to take part in a high-level economic dialogue with China.
In the end, he said, the email overstated what the meeting would offer. “There was some puffery to the email, perhaps to get the meeting, to make it happen,” he said. “There was probably some bait and switch about what it was really supposed to be about.” Mr. Kushner and his wife, Ivanka, are not accompanying Mr. Trump to Paris. Instead they plan to attend the annual media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, sponsored by the investment firm Allen & Company. An official said the couple would pay for their own travel and lodgings.
He said the meeting lasted about 20 minutes and that Mr. Kushner left after five to 10 minutes and Mr. Manafort spent most of the session looking at his cellphone. The conversation by Ms. Veselnitskaya was “sort of nonsensical, inane and garbled,” he added. Mr. Kushner is expected to cooperate in the next several weeks with the Senate and House Intelligence Committees that are looking into Russia’s intervention in the American election and any possible collusion with the Trump campaign. He will have to devote some time to preparing for those appearances with his team of lawyers.
He said he never mentioned the meeting to his father. “There was nothing to tell,” he said. “It was literally just a wasted 20 minutes, which was a shame.” Colleagues of Mr. Kushner said he had remained focused and upbeat despite the drumbeat of negative headlines — a trait they ascribe to his experience dealing with the legal troubles of his father, Charles Kushner, who was convicted of tax evasion and witness tampering.
But he promised to cooperate with investigators. “I just want the truth to get out there,” he said. “And that’s part of why I released all the stuff today. I wanted to get it all out there.” But even as the White House labors to present a business-as-usual facade, there is evidence that Mr. Trump’s family will be drawn deeper into the investigation. Two officials familiar with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation said the panel was now planning to expand its inquiry to include Donald Trump Jr.
In Moscow, Aras Agalarov, the billionaire founder of a real estate empire whose son made the connection with Donald Trump Jr. dismissed the entire story, calling it invented. The officials said Mr. Trump’s shifting reasons for the meeting — and his acknowledgment that he was lured by the promise of Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton — had forced the Senate panel to begin examining his role in the campaign, and any contacts he may have had with Russians.
Speaking on Russian radio on Wednesday morning, Mr. Agalarov said he doubted the emails released about the meeting were authentic. “I think this is some kind of fabrication,” he said. “I do not know who is making this up. What has Hillary Clinton to do with this?” The first step, officials said, would be for Senate investigators to sit down with Mr. Trump. The Senate panel might also request that he turn over emails and financial records from any dealings with Russia, which they have done with other subjects of their investigation.
Mr. Agalarov said it was his son Emin who knew Donald Trump Jr. and had a connection with Rob Goldstone, the British music promoter whose emails indicated that he set up the meeting. At the same time, Mr. Kushner now looms larger in the Senate investigation, the officials said. Its investigators concluded as early as March that his meetings during the transition with the Russian ambassador and a Russian banker tied to the Kremlin warranted further scrutiny.
Emin Agalarov is the heir to his father’s real estate fortune, and has built a career as a singer. “It’s Emin who’s acquainted with him, not me,” the father said, referring to Donald Jr., adding that the two had met when he worked with the older Mr. Trump to bring the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in 2013. He said he also did not really know Mr. Goldstone. For the president, friends said, the pain of seeing his son ensnared in the Russia scandal was real. In part, that is because, of all his children, he has had the most complicated relationship with Donald Jr., who was a teenager when his parents divorced and did not speak to his father for a year.
“He probably worked as a manager for Emin for some period, or was promoting something in America, I don’t know,” Mr. Agalarov said. “In one word, he worked. They were communicating with each other.” Friends who have known the Trump family for many years said they believed Donald Trump Jr., in setting up the meeting, was only focused on trying to help — and even impress — his father with information that could help his campaign.
Both the Kremlin and the Russian Foreign Ministry were dismissive of the reports. Dmitri S. Peskov, the spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin, repeated that the Kremlin knew nothing about the events and had never been in touch with Ms. Veselnitskaya. President Trump has been equally protective of his other children. After Ivanka came under criticism for taking her father’s seat in Germany, he defended her in a tweet and cited Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. “When I left Conference Room for short meetings with Japan and other countries,” he said, “I asked Ivanka to hold seat. Very standard. Angela M agrees!”
“This TV series can compete with the most successful ones in the U.S., but we are not part of it,” Mr. Peskov told reporters. “How can a lawyer represent the Russian state? Only when he participates in a legal case in which Russia is one of the sides.” Nobody offered a more passionate defense of Ivanka than Donald Trump Jr.
“Look at the attacks on Ivanka,” he told Mr. Hannity on Tuesday night. “If she was anyone else’s daughter, she’d be a feminist icon — this incredible, brilliant, well-spoken woman. And they try to belittle her at every chance. It’s really sad.”
“For me as a family member, as her brother, as her older brother, you know you do take it personally and it does make you want to fight back,” he added. “What we are is we are fighters and they don’t take well to that, either, because most people don’t like being called on their stuff.”