Despite telling Reuters that he only heard about his son’s troubling emails just “a couple of days ago,” a new stunning report from Yahoo News reporter Michael Isikoff claims that Donald Trump’s team of lawyers have known about the chain of correspondences for weeks.
According to Yahoo News, “President Trump’s legal team was informed more than three weeks ago about the email chain showing that his son Donald Jr. met with a Kremlin-connected lawyer last June.”
More from the report:
Trump told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday that he learned just “a couple of days ago†that his son, Donald Trump Jr, had met with the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, after receiving emails that she would supply him with information that “would incriminate Hillary†and was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.†That was the day after Donald Jr. released the email exchanges himself, after learning they would be published by the New York Times.
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Trump repeated that assertion in a talk with reporters Air Force One on his way to Paris Wednesday night. “I only heard about it two or three days ago,†he said according to a transcript of his talk when asked about the meeting with Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in June 2016 attended by Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign chief, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
But the sources told Yahoo News that Marc Kasowitz, the president’s chief lawyer in the Russia investigation, and Alan Garten, executive vice president and chief legal officer of the Trump Organization, were both informed about the emails in the third week of June, after they were discovered by lawyers for Kushner, who is now a senior White House official.
The idea that Trump’s own lawyers would know about the explosive emails – which showed that Trump Jr. met with a Kremlin-backed lawyer – and the president himself would be left out of the loop is almost impossible to believe.
What’s more likely is that Trump has known about the emails at least as long as his lawyers have, or he knew about his son’s secret meeting from the beginning. Perhaps he even encouraged it, for all we know.
The latter would explain the president’s rhetoric and emphasis on the subject of Russia hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails around the same time Donald Jr. met with the Russian lawyer.
Either way, it’s clear that Donald Trump is lying, which is hardly news.
Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
