Defending his son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 presidential campaign, President Trump wrongly blamed former Attorney General Loretta Lynch for admitting the lawyer to the United States in the first place.

“Somebody said that her visa or her passport was approved by Attorney General Lynch,” Mr. Trump said Thursday at a joint news conference with President Emmanuel Macron of France. “She was here because of Lynch.”

Mr. Trump was referring to a report in a Capitol Hill publication, The Hill, on how Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer, entered the United States without a visa in early 2016.

Ms. Veselnitskaya, according to the report, was granted immigration parole to represent a Russian businessman, Denis Katsyv, in a money laundering case in New York City.