Kremlin-linked lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya speaks to a journalist in Moscow, Russia on Nov. 8, 2016. | Yury Martyanov/Kommersant Photo via AP Russian lawyer: Donald Trump Jr. wanted DNC info ‘so badly’

The Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. during the 2016 presidential election said on Tuesday that it appeared that the president’s son and others at the meeting were “longing” for information on the Democratic National Committee.

In an interview broadcast Tuesday on NBC's "Today" show, the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, was asked why Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, would be under the impression that they’d be told information about the DNC, which was hacked during the election.


"It's quite possible that maybe they were longing for such information. They wanted it so badly,” Veselnitskaya said of the June 2016 meeting.

Speaking via a translator, Veselnitskaya denied that she was ever in possession of any "damaging or sensitive information" about Clinton and that "it was never my intention to have" such information. Further, she denied having any ties to the Russian government and said her meeting with the president's son, son-in-law and campaign chairman was intended only to benefit her client's interest related to sanctions leveled back and forth between Russia and the U.S.

Veselnitskaya recalled that Trump Jr. ran the meeting and that she was not introduced to Manafort or Kushner by name and only later recognized who they were. She said Kushner left the meeting within "seven to 10 minutes" of its starting and did not return. Manafort, she said, was occupied by his phone for the entire meeting and did not speak.

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Trump Jr., through an attorney, said Monday night he “did nothing wrong” when he met with Veselnitskaya, but did say in a statement that Veselnitskaya had "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."

The president's son, who now helps oversee the family business empire, added that "it quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information" and that an offer of such information had been a pretext for gaining a meeting to press her client's interests. But in a post to his Twitter account, Trump Jr. also seemingly conceded that he had been interested in obtaining information on Clinton and her campaign.

"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 wrote online.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, said Tuesday in an interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that he hopes to have Trump Jr. testify before his committee under oath.

"If that report is correct, this email disclosed to the Trump campaign the truth that the Russian government had damaging information, that they wanted to help elect Donald Trump, and it put, certainly, the first family on notice of all of these facts," Schiff said. "It makes all the denials we've seen since that much more unbelievably suspect, so certainly this bears a lot of investigation. These participants are all going to have to come before the committee."