Trump Admits That His Team Wanted Dirt on Clinton

The president has gone back on his account of a meeting that took place in 2016 between his inner circle and a Russian lawyer.

Donald Trump has cut off his nose to spite his face. The president of the United States acknowledged on Sunday in a post on Twitter that, in June 2016, his campaign team had met with a Russian lawyer linked to the Kremlin in order to dig up dirt on his then-election rival, Hillary Clinton. Contradicting a statement issued in 2017 by his son, Donald Trump Jr., who had attended the meeting and claimed that its only point of discussion had been issues relating to the adoption of Russian children, Trump completely undermined this account, which he had originally dictated, by admitting that the objective of the meeting had been to try to gather “information on an opponent.”

The president added that this was “totally legal” and maintained that sniffing around for weaknesses in a rival was “done all the time in politics.” He went on to say that the meeting “went nowhere” and, covering his own back, pointed out that besides this, he “did not know about it.”

The meeting took place in June 2016 in Trump Tower, the magnate’s headquarters in New York. The presidential election was five months away. The president’s eldest son, his then-campaign chief Paul Manafort, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, were among those in attendance. They met with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with allegedly strong connections to the Kremlin, who was brought into contact with Trump Jr. by an intermediary who informed him that the mysterious attorney had “very high level” information that was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

When The New York Times revealed in 2017 that the meeting had taken place, Trump Jr. downplayed the incident in his statement as having been an alleged chat about adoptions; it later emerged that the statement had been dictated by Trump [Sr.] himself. The president has now, however, gone back on this account, resulting in a case of Trump’s word against Trump’s word.

The meeting in New York is one of the key events under scrutiny by the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller into the possibility that the Trump campaign colluded with the government of Vladimir Putin in order to sabotage Clinton’s candidacy. It is illegal in the U.S. for campaigns to accept help from foreign individuals or governments, and this meeting, regardless of whether or not it provided information to Trump’s team about Clinton, may have violated this law. Veselnitskaya had worked for some of Moscow’s high-profile government officials and had even received support from the Ministry for Internal Affairs in moving forward with a case being dealt with by her private office.

Trump’s disconcerting tweet on Sunday was his response to an anonymously sourced article published in the Washington Times reporting that the president was feeling anxious about the investigations into the meeting at Trump Tower, which have raised the stakes in a case that threatens the stability of his presidency and puts his eldest son at legal risk. Alluding to this revelation, Trump asserted in his tweet that it was an unfounded “fabrication” that he was concerned for his “wonderful son.”

In other tweets that he posted on Sunday, Trump attacked Mueller’s investigation and, for the umpteenth time, called it a “witch hunt.” Through his compulsive use of Twitter, the president is turning a deaf ear to the advice of his legal team, which has advised him to stop commenting on the investigation, as this could — as he has done in this case by backtracking on another official statement — provide Mueller with ammunition.