Trump says he didn't know about Trump Jr.'s meeting with Russian lawyer
President Trump says he didn't know until a couple of days ago that his son, Donald Trump Jr., met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya during the presidential campaign last year.
"I didn't know until a couple of days ago when I heard about this," he told Reuters in an interview Wednesday.
Trump Jr. released emails Tuesday that showed that he believed his meeting with Vesenitskaya would yield damaging information about Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. Further, this information was coming from the Russian government, which, according to the emails, supported his father's campaign.
Also, President Trump doesn't appear to feel that his son did anything wrong by meeting with the Russian lawyer. "I think many people would have held that meeting," the president told Reuters.
The president also talked about his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week, saying that he asked Putin whether he was involved in alleged Russian meddling in the presidential campaign. Putin denied that he had. Mr. Trump said that he spent the first 20-25 minutes of the 2 hour, 16 minute meeting with Putin talking about the meddling. The U.S. intelligence community concluded last year that Russia was in fact meddling.
"I said, did you do it? And he said no, I did not. Absolutely not. I then asked him a second time in a totally different way. He said absolutely not," Trump said.
In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, the president argued that Putin would have preferred Hillary Clinton as president.