President Trump says son is innocent after release of emails setting up Russian meeting

WASHINGTON — After initially holding back, President Donald Trump jumped to the defense of his son Wednesday morning, denouncing reports about Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Russian lawyer to gain incriminating information about Hillary Clinton as part of "the greatest witch hunt in political history."

The president fired off posts on Twitter insisting that his son was "innocent" of wrongdoing and embracing the theory that he may even have been "the victim" in the case. He assailed the use of anonymous sources in the reports, although in this instance the story was confirmed by emails released by Donald Trump Jr.

"My son Donald did a good job last night," Trump wrote on Twitter, referring to his son's appearance Tuesday on Sean Hannity's show on Fox News. "He was open, transparent and innocent. This is the greatest Witch Hunt in political history. Sad!"

In another message, Trump added, "Remember, when you hear the words "sources say" from the Fake Media, often times those sources are made up and do not exist." And he retweeted a Fox News Twitter message quoting one of the network's commentators saying, "I believe Don Jr. is the victim here." And in another post, he quoted The Washington Times as saying that "Democrats have willfully used Moscow disinformation to influence the presidential election against Donald Trump."

The Russian government weighed in Wednesday as well, essentially mirroring the president's argument that the U.S. news media was fueling a fake scandal.

"You know, it was with amazement that I learned that a Russian lawyer is being accused of communicating with Trump within Trump's jurisdiction," Sergey Lavrov, the foreign minister, told reporters in Brussels at a news conference with his Belgian counterpart. "Basically, to me it looks like barbarism, because when someone is talking to a lawyer — what kind of a problem, what threat could this constitute for anyone?"

Lavrov added: "It's amazing how serious people are making a mountain out of a molehill, even though there may be no molehill in the first place."

Trump's messages Wednesday morning and late Tuesday represented a shift in strategy. He said nothing publicly about Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with the Russian lawyer for days after it was first reported in The New York Times, and after the emails were released Tuesday he issued only a tepid one-sentence statement through his White House spokeswoman calling his son a "high-quality person."

Advisers had urged him to avoid publicly commenting on the reports, but evidently he changed course as he watched coverage on cable television.

[White House rattled as president fumes over fallout from son's Russia revelations]

Donald Trump Jr. released the emails after learning that The Times had them and was about to publish them. They show that he was approached by an intermediary in June 2016 as his father was wrapping up the Republican presidential nomination about meeting with a woman described as a Russian government lawyer who had information that would "incriminate Hillary."

The damaging information was "part of Russia and its government support for Mr. Trump," the email to Donald Trump Jr. said. He responded, "If it's what you say I love it."

Trump invited Jared Kushner, his brother-in-law and now a senior White House adviser, and Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman, to join him at the meeting with the …(Continued on next page) Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya.

Both Donald Trump Jr. and Veselnitskaya have said in recent days that no actual incriminating information about Clinton was discussed during the meeting and that instead Veselnitskaya brought up U.S. sanctions imposed on Russians accused of human rights abuses, a topic of great interest to the Kremlin.

In his interview with Hannity on Tuesday night, the younger Trump acknowledged regret about how he handled the situation. "In retrospect, I probably would have done things a little differently," he said. "Again, this is before the Russia mania. This is before they were building it up in the press. For me, this was opposition research."

Trump said he took the meeting as "a courtesy to an acquaintance" and that "I don't even think my sirens went up or the antennas went up at this time," even though the email said explicitly that it was part of a Russian government effort to help his father.

[Read the emails setting up Donald Trump Jr.'s Russia meeting]

In the end, he said, the email overstated what the meeting would offer. "There was some puffery to the email, perhaps to get the meeting, to make it happen," he said. "There was probably some bait and switch about what it was really supposed to be about."

He said the meeting lasted about 20 minutes and that Kushner left after 5 to 10 minutes and Manafort spent most of the session looking at his cellphone. The conversation by Veselnitskaya was "sort of nonsensical, inane and garbled," he added.

He said he never mentioned the meeting to his father. "There was nothing to tell," he said. "It was literally just a wasted 20 minutes, which was a shame."

But he promised to cooperate with investigators. "I just want the truth to get out there," he said. "And that's part of why I released all the stuff today. I wanted to get it all out there."

In Moscow, Aras Agalarov, the billionaire founder of a real estate empire whose son made the connection with Donald Trump Jr. dismissed the entire story, calling it invented.

Speaking on Russian radio Wednesday morning, Agalarov said he doubted the emails released about the meeting were authentic. "I think this is some kind of fabrication," he said. "I do not know who is making this up. What has Hillary Clinton to do with this?"

Agalarov said it was his son Emin who knew Donald Trump Jr. and had a connection with Rob Goldstone, the British music promoter whose emails indicated that he set up the meeting.

Emin Agalarov is the heir to his father's real estate fortune, and has built a career as a singer. "It's Emin who's acquainted with him, not me," the father said, referring to Donald Jr., adding that the two had met when he worked with the older Trump to bring the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in 2013. He said he also did not really know Goldstone.

"He probably worked as a manager for Emin for some period, or was promoting something in America, I don't know," Agalarov said. "In one word, he worked. They were communicating with each other."

Both the Kremlin and the Russian Foreign Ministry were dismissive of the reports. Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for President Vladimir Putin, repeated that the Kremlin knew nothing about the events and had never been in touch with Veselnitskaya.

"This TV series can compete with the most successful ones in the U.S., but we are not part of it," Peskov told reporters. "How can a lawyer represent the Russian state? Only when he participates in a legal case in which Russia is one of the sides."