Donald Trump Jr. is in hot water today because of his undisclosed meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin. It seems that he got the penchant for the nondisclosure of meetings from his father, President Donald Trump.
The New York Post reported that President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin had a second undisclosed meeting at the G20 Summit in Germany. It happened after their two-hour bilateral meeting on July 7, according to Michael Anton, the spokesman of the National Security Council.
The meeting was held in the same room where they had dinner.
Breach of national security protocol
Only the G20 leaders were at the dinner -- excluding staff and cabinet members -- but Anton said there were translators present. His version was different from that of Ian Bremmer, the president of the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy. He said there was no translator from the U.S. The situation raised eyebrows among the other national leaders who attended the dinner because it allegedly breached national security protocol, Reuters reported. The meeting lasted about one hour, Bremmer said.
More secret meetings
Secret meetings, it seems, are a trademark of the Trump administration, as evident during the campaign days.
In April, The Washington Post reported that to establish the back channel between Putin and Trump, which White House senior adviser Jared Kushner proposed, there was a secret meeting.
It was between Eric Prince, the founder of Blackwater -- a private military contractor -- and a Russian envoy. Like Donald Jr.’s meeting with Veselnitskaya brokered by British publicist Rob Goldberg, the Seychelles meeting between Prince and the Russian diplomat also had a broker.
It was Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, and his brother. The meeting was held after the Middle Eastern prince first met with Kushner and Steve Bannon in New York City.
Prince, although he had no role in Trump’s transition team, is the brother of Education Secretary Betsy de Vos and a close friend of Bannon -- now the chief strategist of the White House -- who donated $250,000 to Trump’s campaign.
A spokesman for Prince said in a statement to The Washington Post that the meeting had nothing to do with Trump. He questioned why Prince was under surveillance by the U.S. intelligence community, which he said, is underresourced when it should be looking instead for terrorists. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer also said that it was not aware of Prince’s meeting and pointed out that the Blackwater owner is not a member of Trump’s transition team.
