President Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., agreed to meet with a “Russian government attorney” last summer after receiving an email offering him “very high level and sensitive information” that would “incriminate” Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, according to emails the younger Trump publicly released on Tuesday.
An email from publicist Rob Goldstone offered Trump Jr. a meeting with a “Russian government attorney” after offering “some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia.”
Trump Jr. tweeted out the emails along with a statement on Tuesday (July 11).
Trump Jr.’s statement is as follows:
To everyone, in order to be totally transparent, I am releasing the entire email chain of my emails with Rob Goldstone about the meeting on June 9, 2016. The first email on June 3, 2016 was from Rob, who was relating a request from Emin, a person I knew from the 2013 Ms. Universe Pageant near Moscow. Emin and his father have a very highly respected company in Moscow. The information they suggested they had about Hillary Clinton I thought was Political Opposition Research. I first wanted to just have a phone call but when that didn’t work out, they said the woman would be in New York and asked if I would meet. I decided to take the meeting. The woman, as she has said publicly, was not a government official. And, as we have said, she had no information to provide and wanted to talk about adoption policy and the Magnitsky Act. To put this in context, this occurred before the current Russian fever was in vogue. As Rob Goldstone said just today in the press, the entire meeting was “the most insane nonsense I ever heard. And I was actually agitated by it.”
“This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” Goldstone, who represents the son of an Azerbaijani-Russian businessman close to Russian government, wrote in the email to Trump Jr.
“If it’s what you say I love it,” Trump Jr. replied, according to the email he released.
The Russian attorney, Natalia Veselnitskaya, denied in an interview with NBC News having ever acted on behalf of the Russian government.
And despite Goldstone’s promises, Veselnitskaya offered no consequential information on Clinton, according to the lawyer and Trump Jr.
Trump Jr. tweeted out the emails after The New York Times first reported on the meeting between Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer on Saturday. The Times subsequently reported that Trump Jr. had been informed that the information he was promised on Clinton was part of Russian government efforts to help his father’s campaign.
Trump Jr. tweeted that he was releasing the emails to be “totally transparent,” but his release came moments before The New York Times published the emails.
The email disclosure came after Trump, Jr. has steadily changed his story since Saturday, when The New York Times first reported on the meeting with the Russian attorney, at first offering no indication that the meeting was in any way tied to an offer of damaging information against Clinton until the New York Times uncovered the true motives behind Trump, Jr.’s decision to accept the meeting.
Trump Jr.’s attorney has dismissed the revelations as “much ado about nothing” and Trump Jr. said in a statement Tuesday morning that he thought the information being offered was “Political Opposition Research.”
“I first wanted to just have a phone call but when that didn’t work out, they said the woman would be in New York and asked if I would meet. I decided to take the meeting. The woman, as she has said publicly, was not a government official,” Trump Jr. said in a statement he tweeted along with the emails. “And, as we have said, she had no information to provide and wanted to talk about adoption policy and the Magnitsky Act.”
