White House: Trump “Weighed In” on Son’s Misleading Statement Explaining Russia Meeting

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said “any father” would have acted similarly.

The White House on Tuesday attempted to downplay President Donald Trump’s role in helping draft the initial statement from Donald Trump Jr. in which Trump’s eldest son attempted to explain his previously undisclosed meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer during the 2016 campaign.

“The president weighed in as any father would based on the limited information that he had,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. “This is all discussion frankly of no consequence.”

She also denied a Washington Post account of Trump’s involvement reporting that the president personally “dictated” a majority of the statement, which claimed that the focus of the undisclosed meeting was about Russian adoptions. But emails published by the New York Times—and Trump Jr. himself—later showed that the initial statement was misleading: At the center of the meeting was not adoptions, but a promise of damaging information on Hillary Clinton—a prospect Trump Jr. appeared eager to receive.

Sanders continued to push back on Tuesday, asserting that the only “misleading” factor was reporters pushing a “false narrative” about the Russia scandal.

The confirmation on Tuesday that the president had a role in crafting his son’s response also directly contradicts vehement denials from Trump’s lawyers: “The president did not draft the response,” Jay Sekulow, the president’s personal lawyer, said during a July 16 appearance on Meet the Press. “The response came from Donald Trump Jr. and I’m sure in consultation with his lawyer.”

“I do want to be clear the president was not involved in the drafting of the statement and did not issue the statement,” Sekulow added.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67vEfBAFzSA

The revelation last month that Trump Jr. had met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya during the election in hopes of receiving incriminating information on Clinton sparked a firestorm of controversy, with legal experts describing it as the strongest hard evidence yet that Trump associates may have colluded with Russian officials to win the presidential election. 

WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate