The following article by Maggie Haberman was posted on the New York Times website July 17, 2017:
WASHINGTON — He ran on a promise to end politics as usual.
But on Monday morning, President Trump posted a defense on Twitter of his son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer promising sensitive government information that could be damaging to Hillary Clinton by saying that it was simply politics as usual.
In Mr. Trump’s newest tweet about his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and a meeting on June 9, 2016, at Trump Tower, he described the gathering as routine and something almost anyone in politics would have wanted to attend.
“Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent,” Mr. Trump wrote just after 10 a.m. “That’s politics!”
Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That’s politics!
Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, repeated the president’s assertion in a briefing later in the day, adding that politics did not even come up during the meeting.
“It is quite often for people who are given information during the heat of a campaign to ask what that is,” Mr. Spicer told reporters during a briefing at which cameras were banned. “That’s what simply he did. The president’s made it clear through his tweet.”
Mr. Spicer then added, “And there was nothing as far as we know that would lead anyone to believe that there was anything except for discussion about adoption and the Magnitsky Act.”
His explanation echoed the one initially offered by Donald Trump Jr. for his meeting with the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya. Moscow barred Americans from adopting Russian children in retaliation for the passage of the Magnitsky Act, which authorized travel and financial sanctions on Russians suspected of human rights abuses.
But after it was reported that Donald Trump Jr. had been told in advance that he would be provided with incriminating information about Mrs. Clinton, he acknowledged that was the agenda for the meeting. But he said that Ms. Veselnitskaya did not provide the promised information, and instead talked about adoption policy and the Magnitsky Act.
The president has insisted that he learned of the meeting only a few days before it was first reported by The New York Times. In response to the article, Mr. Trump’s aides helped write his son’s initial statement explaining why he had met with Ms. Veselnitskaya as they flew back with the president from the Group of 20 summit meeting in Europe on Air Force One. After debating how transparent to be, the president signed off on a statement from his son that was so incomplete that it required days of follow-up statements.
Some of those briefed on the response to the initial article insisted that Donald Trump Jr. had not wanted to be forthcoming, but three people involved said that was not the case, a statement his lawyer backed on Monday.
The lawyer, Alan Futerfas, said in a statement that he and his client “were fully prepared and absolutely prepared” before the initial article on the meeting to make what he called “a fulsome statement about the nature of the meeting, what led to the meeting, what the conversation was in the meeting,” but they were overruled.
View the post here.