Even if the Russian government offered allegedly damaging information about Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump Jr., Jay Sekulow, the lawyer of President Donald Trump, said there is nothing wrong with it. He even insisted in five news programs aired on Sunday morning that Donald Jr. did not break any law when he met Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin.
Sekulow claimed that Trump was not aware and did not participate in the meeting. The Wall Street Journal pointed out that before the meeting, British publicist Rob Goldberg communicated with Donald Jr.
by email about the possibility of the Trump campaign being provided a copy of a report with damaging information from the Russian government about Clinton.
Raises questions about timing of announcement
Before Donald Jr.’s meeting with Veselnitskaya, Trump, the Republican candidate, announced he would give a campaign speech with major news about Clinton. Although he did not give the speech, the timing of his announcement raised questions as to whether he was aware of his son’s meeting with Veselnitskaya.
Michael Caputo, a former campaign adviser of Trump, said that while Donald Jr.’s meeting with the Russians may have been a mistake, the canceled speech did not prove anything because the real estate billionaire delivered other speeches in which things he said did not happen.
Caputo told the House Intelligence Committee on Friday he did not have any contact with Russians and he never heard anyone in the campaign talking to Russians.
Thank you to former campaign adviser Michael Caputo for saying so powerfully that there was no Russian collusion in our winning campaign.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 16, 2017
Sekulow said it is easy to say in hindsight that meeting a lawyer who represented a foreign government was a mistake, but it is a different case if the meeting happened in the middle of a campaign.
He claimed similar meetings take place among members of both parties as part of opposition research, but even some Republicans disagreed. Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins said if invited to such a meeting, she would turn it down.
No checking for counterintelligence threat
Jonathan Wackrow, a Secret Service member for 14 years, corrected the claim of Sekulow that the agency did not stop the meeting.
He pointed out that the agency only made physical checks on anyone entering Trump’s office using magnetometers. The Secret Service only checked the names of people likely to be a physical threat to the Republican candidate. The agency did not check for a possible counterintelligence threat, Huffington Post reported
