Donald Trump had hoped to put allegations of Russian collusion behind him – but then along came an email chain, and a week of frantic denials

It was a fairly quiet week for Donald Trump, but his son and namesake more than made up for it. A drip-drip-drip of stories gradually revealed Donald Trump Jr to have come very close to undermining his father’s claims that there was no collusion between his campaign and Russia to help him win the 2016 election.

Ex-Soviet counter-intelligence officer says he attended Trump Jr meeting Read more

Last weekend

Donald Trump returned from the G20 summit in Hamburg and his meeting with Vladimir Putin hoping to put questions of his campaign’s links to Russia’s alleged election meddling behind him. “Now it is time to move forward in working constructively with Russia!” he tweeted on Sunday. Behind the scenes, however, his staff had been slaving over a statement from the president’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr, in response to a story the New York Times were planning to publish on Saturday night, the paper reported.

The story said Trump Jr – then a key member of his father’s campaign staff and now in control with his brother Eric of Trump Sr’s real estate empire – held a meeting in Trump Tower in June 2016 with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with connections to the Kremlin. Campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Trump Jr’s brother-in-law Jared Kushner – now a senior White House aide – were also present. Trump Jr’s statement – signed off by Trump Sr, according to the Times – said the three key campaign figures had “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children”. The story’s main importance seemed to be that it showed Trump campaign sympathy for a Russian cause and it caught Trump Jr in a lie: in March, he denied taking part in campaign-related meetings with Russians.

“Nothing at all was discussed about the presidential campaign,” said Veselnitskaya, who also denied having acted on behalf of the Russian government.

On Sunday, the Times’s sources contradicted key elements of Trump Jr’s statement. In fact, the paper reported, Trump Jr had been promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to the meeting. This was the first indication that some in the Trump campaign had been willing to accept Russian help to damage their Democratic opponent.

Trump Jr issued a new statement. “After pleasantries were exchanged,” he said, “the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Mrs Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense.”

After that the conversation turned to the adoption issue, he claimed, also adding that he had not told Kushner and Manafort what the meeting was going to be about. The president’s lawyer said Trump Sr had not been aware of the meeting.

Monday

On Monday, the mess got significantly deeper. The Times reported that before arranging the meeting with Veselnitskaya, Trump Jr had been told the material she had to offer was part of a Russian government effort to help his father’s presidential campaign. The key unanswered question in the Russia inquiries so far has been whether anyone in the Trump campaign colluded with what US intelligence says were Russian state efforts to swing the election in Trump’s favour. The Times was careful to point out that the email arranging the meeting – sent by British music promoter Rob Goldstone – did not suggest any link to the Russian hack of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails, which US intelligence sees as one of the major strands of Russia’s election meddling.

Trump Jr changed his story again. Alan Futerfas, his lawyer, admitted that Goldstone had contacted Trump Jr and “suggested that people had information concerning alleged wrongdoing by Democratic party frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, in her dealings with Russia”. Trump Jr tweeted sarcastically: “Obviously I’m the first person on a campaign to ever take a meeting to hear info about an opponent … went nowhere but had to listen.”

He also defended his shifting explanations: “No inconsistency in statements, meeting ended up being primarily about adoptions. In response to further Q’s I simply provided more details.” White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said: “Don Jr did not collude with anybody to influence the election. No one within the Trump campaign colluded in order to influence the election.” And Goldstone denied that he had ever mentioned the Russian government in his email. “Never, never ever,” he said, claiming he thought Veselnitskaya was a “private citizen” and saying the information she had given was “just a vague, generic statement about the campaign’s funding and how people, including Russian people, living all over the world donate when they shouldn’t donate”.

The Senate and House intelligence committees called for Trump Jr to give evidence. In related news, Trump Sr backed away from what he had trumpeted as a cyber-security working group with Russia, tweeting: “The fact that President Putin and I discussed a Cyber Security unit doesn’t mean I think it can happen. It can’t.”

Tuesday



Like father like son? What conservatives are writing about Donald Trump Jr Read more

On Tuesday, the Times told Trump Jr they had obtained the Goldstone emails and were going to publish them, and asked him for a comment, the paper says. Trump Jr asked for time to respond, and then “before the news organisation had heard back”, posted the emails himself on Twitter.

The emails backed up the Times stories, in damning detail. They showed Goldstone telling Trump Jr that “the crown prosecutor of Russia” had offered “to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father”. He added: “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr Trump.”

Trump Jr replied enthusiastically: “If it’s what you say, I love it.”

Far from believing she was a private citizen, Goldstone described Veselnitskaya as a “Russian government attorney”.

The formatting of the emails indicated that Trump Jr had forwarded the whole exchange to Manafort and Kushner. The message to his colleagues with the forwarded emails – “Meeting got moved to 4 tomorrow at my offices” – suggested that the three had discussed the meeting before in a different forum. An associate of Manafort said Manafort had not read to the bottom of the chain. Kushner’s attorney did not respond.

Trump Sr issued his first statement on the matter. “My son is a high-quality person and I applaud his transparency,” he said. But Trump Jr’s “transparency” had only come after several days of misleading and incomplete statements.

Republican criticism was muted but Democrats came out with all guns blazing, former vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine even raising the word “treason”. Norm Eisen, ethics czar under Barack Obama, said: “It’s another significant step forward in the investigation of Trump collusion with Russia because it represents an offer to collude and an acceptance of collusion to harm the campaign of Hillary Clinton and intrude upon our democracy.” That night, Trump Jr appeared on Fox News for a soft-soap interview in which he admitted: “In retrospect I probably would have done things a little differently.”

Wednesday



Trump’s praised his son for having done a “good job” on Fox News the night before. “He was open, transparent and innocent,” the president claimed. “This is the greatest Witch Hunt in political history. Sad!” He advised his 34 million followers: “Remember, when you hear the words ‘sources say’ from the Fake Media, often times those sources are made up and do not exist.”

In the case of the New York Times stories about Trump Jr, the emails released by Trump Jr had proved the paper’s sources absolutely right.

Meanwhile, Christopher Wray, the man Trump has chosen to replace the fired FBI chief James Comey, told the Senate judiciary committee the Russia investigation was not a “witch hunt” and said he would treat any attempt to tamper with it “very sternly”.

Thursday



Trump and Melania Trump landed in Paris, where Emmanuel Macron had invited them to join Bastille Day celebrations. At a joint news conference with Macron, Trump dismissed his son’s meeting with Veselenitskaya as meaningless, saying “nothing happened” and arguing that “most people would have taken that meeting” on the chance of finding dirt about their opponent.

Political veterans including Obama aide David Axelrod reacted sharply, calling it “crazy to say Junior’s Russia meeting was standard”. But Republicans in Congress appeared largely to agree with Trump, with few expressing concern. Exceptions included South Carolina representative Trey Gowdy and Senate judiciary committee chairman Chuck Grassley, who said he had drafted a letter calling on Trump Jr to testify.

As the latest version of the Republican healthcare bill struggled to gain traction in the Senate, meanwhile, Trump and his team stuck to the sidelines. “I’d say the only thing more difficult than peace between Israel and the Palestinians is healthcare,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One.

Friday

Donald Trump Jr: from childhood struggles to global notoriety Read more

Donald Trump Jr’s description of his June 2016 meeting turned out to have been even more incomplete than previously thought. It emerged that Rinat Akhmetshin, a pro-Moscow lobbyist who claims he served in a counterintelligence unit but never formally trained as a spy, was there too. And at least one other person was there, identified as of this writing as a translator.

Were they all there to discuss adoption, as Trump Jr initially said? It appeared not. Veselnitskaya, the lawyer, passed the Trump campaign papers she said documented the flow of illicit funds into the Democratic National Committee, Akhmetshin told the Associated Press. This was nine days before a hacker later linked to the Kremlin began publishing stolen DNC emails. In a separate development, the former head of the Trump campaign digital operation, Brad Parscale, issued a weak denial of alleged collusion with Russia to target swing US election districts with fake news.

“I am unaware of any Russian involvement in the digital and data operations of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign,” Parscale said.

Both the president and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, hired new lawyers.

Sign up for the Minute: the day in US politics, condensed