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Donald Trump Jr. (L) and Eric Trump, sons of U.S. President Donald Trump, attend the ceremony to nominate Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court in the East Room of the White House January 31, 2017 in Washington, DC.
Donald Trump Jr. met with a lawyer who had access to the Kremlin because she may have dangled information potentially damaging to the campaign of Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton, The New York Times reported on Sunday.
In the midst of a hotly contested campaign, the eldest son of President Donald Trump, Paul J. Manafort, the president’s campaign manager at the time, and his son in law Jared Kushner, all met with the lawyer in Trump Tower, the Times reported.
At the height of the campaign, a massive trove of emails from the Democratic National Committee were leaked to Wikileaks, which roiled the Clinton campaign. Russian hackers were widely suspected as having been behind the leak.
The Times’ revelation comes as questions about Russia’s role in influencing the 2016 election continue to reverberate across Washington, and have undermined the White House’s effort to stay on message with respect to policy.
It also comes in the wake of President Trump’s first face-to-face encounter with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who stands accused of meddling in the 2016 general election.
The meeting took place just weeks after Donald J. Trump clinched the Republican nomination, the Times reported. It’s not clear whether the Russian lawyer, named Natalia Veselnitskaya, actually produced compromising information about Mrs. Clinton. However, sources told the publication the people interviewed by The Times about the meeting said the expectation was that she would do so.
In a statement given to the Times on Sunday, Donald Trump Jr. said he had met with Veselnitskaya, but found her statements “vague…and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”
The full story can be found on the Times’ website.
