Tag: opposition research

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.

Even in the take-no-prisoners world of opposition research, Trump Jr.’s meeting was highly unusual

The following article by David A. Fahrenthold was posted on the Washington Post website July 11, 2017:

Donald Trump Jr. has defended his meeting with a Russian lawyer and said he did nothing wrong. (Richard Drew/AP)

Donald Trump Jr. said Tuesday that he agreed to a meeting with a Russian lawyer during last year’s campaign because he believed that the individual had information about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

“I thought [the information] was Political Opposition Research,” Trump Jr. wrote on Twitter, in a statement explaining why he’d agreed to meet the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya.

At the same time, Trump Jr. released emails showing that he was told Veselnitskaya was a “Russian government attorney” whose information about Clinton was part of “Russia and its government’s support” for his father. Continue reading “Even in the take-no-prisoners world of opposition research, Trump Jr.’s meeting was highly unusual”