Donald Trump Jr. ‘Happy’ To Work With Senate Intelligence Panel On Russia
By RFE RL
(RFE/RL) — U.S. President Donald Trump’s eldest son on July 10 offered to talk to a Senate committee investigating alleged Russian interference in last year’s presidential election, after he admitted meeting a Russian lawyer during the campaign.
“Happy to work with the committee to pass on what I know,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote on Twitter.
Trump Jr., as well as two other close associates of Trump, met with the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, in June 2016 at Trump Tower in New York.
Trump Jr. has said he agreed to meet the lawyer, whom the New York Times described as having links to the Kremlin, after being promised damaging information about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Trump’s then-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, also attended the meeting, the newspaper said. It described the encounter as the first confirmed private meeting between members of Donald Trump’s inner circle and a Russian national.
A special counsel, Robert Mueller, and congressional committees are investigating whether Russia interfered in the election and colluded with the Trump campaign.
Moscow denies the allegations, and Trump says there was no collusion.
Earlier on July 10, a Republican member of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee called on Donald Trump Jr. to testify to the panel.
“Our intelligence committee needs to interview him and others who attended the meeting,” Senator Susan Collins told the media.
Also on July 10, Trump Jr.’s office said he had hired New York lawyer Alan Futerfas to represent him in connection with Russia-related investigations.
Allegations of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia have cast a shadow over the president’s first months in office.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said on July 10 that there was nothing inappropriate about the meeting with lawyer Veselnitskaya.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the Kremlin did not know the identity of the Russian lawyer.
“No, we don’t know who it is and, certainly, we cannot track down all movements of all Russian lawyers both within Russia and abroad,” Peskov said.
A publicist who arranged the meeting with the lawyer last year said he did so at the request of singer and businessman Emin Agalarov, a Moscow-based client of his.
