President Admits Trump Tower Meeting Was Meant to Get Dirt on Clinton Image

The following article by Michael D. Shear and Michael S. Schmidt was posted on the New York Times website August 5, 2018:

President Trump with son Donald Jr. Mr. Trump denied a report he is worried about the legal exposure for his son, who hosted a June 2016 meeting between some of Mr. Trump’s top campaign advisers and a Kremlin-connected lawyer. Credit: Samuel Corum for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Sunday that a Trump Tower meeting between top campaign aides and a Kremlin-connected lawyer was designed to “get information on an opponent” — the starkest acknowledgment yet that a statement he dictated last year about the encounter was misleading.

Mr. Trump made the comment in a tweet on Sunday morning that was intended to be a defense of the June 2016 meeting and the role his son Donald Trump Jr. played in hosting it. The president claimed that it was “totally legal” and of the sort “done all the time in politics.”

But the tweet also served as an admission that the Trump team had not been forthright when Donald Trump Jr. issued a statement in July 2017 saying that the meeting had been primarily about the adoption of Russian children.

View the complete article here.