Trump Jr. vows to push back against collusion charges

Associated Press

NEW YORK

Donald Trump Jr. has long been his father’s id, the brawler who has helped fuel the president’s pugilistic instincts and stood firm as one of his fiercest defenders.

Now the president’s eldest son is at the center of the firestorm over Russian connections swirling around his father’s administration and trying to fight off charges that he was open to colluding with Moscow to defeat Hillary Clinton.

Offered Russian help in defeating Hillary Clinton last year, Don Jr. jumped at the offer: “I love it,” he emailed.

That was in an email chain the younger Trump released Tuesday in which an associate arranging a June 2016 meeting between the president’s son and a Kremlin-linked lawyer promised damaging information about Clinton.

Trump Jr. said that his meeting with the lawyer is the extent of his formal contact with Russia officials and associates.

Trump Jr. said Tuesday night in an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News Channel that “he has probably met with other people from Russia” but insisted that he did not attempt to coordinate to impact the election or try to damage Clinton.

He repeatedly suggested that the charges of collusion were “ridiculous” and “overplayed” and insisted that his father knew nothing about the June 2016 meeting.

“It was such a nothing there was nothing to tell” his father, said Trump Jr.

Earlier this week, when news about the meeting first surfaced, Trump Jr. tweeted that he just “had to listen” when he was offered information about his father’s Democratic opponent.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is requesting information from the Departments of State and Homeland Security about the Russian lawyer.

Trump Jr. has acknowledged the meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya and posted a 2016 email exchange to Twitter on Tuesday that showed he was involved in setting up the meeting.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote the departments to ask how Veselnitskaya was allowed to enter the United States.

Grassley said that according to court documents, she was denied a visa to stay past January 2016, six months before the New York meeting.

The letter is part of a larger investigation Grassley has led into the Foreign Agent Registration Act.

Grassley has expressed concerns that the law is not enforced.

Trump Jr., 39, was one of his father’s loudest defenders throughout the campaign, his role ascendant at the time of the meeting last summer.

But when his father was elected, Trump Jr. stayed in New York to run the family’s sprawling business along with his brother, Eric.

And from that vantage point, he has been a loud and constant defender of his father, firing off broadsides on Twitter and never shying away from a fight against the “fake news” media. Just Monday, he retweeted a video of a doctored clip in which the president’s face is superimposed over a character shooting a Russian jet bearing a CNN logo.

“One of the best I’ve seen,” Trump Jr. tweeted of the video.

In the email chain released Tuesday, Trump Jr. seemed receptive to receiving damaging information from a foreign government.

He released a statement in which he denied any wrongdoing.

His father, conspicuously quiet as details of the meeting have rolled out over the last few days, issued a terse a statement Tuesday in which he said: “My son is a high quality person and I applaud his transparency.”

Deputy White Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said she did not know when the president last spoke to his eldest son.

Trump Jr. has vowed to push back against the charges of collusion, believing that an anti-Trump media is trumping up accusations against him as a way to damage his father and is willfully ignoring his claim that he did not receive any information from the Russian lawyer, according to several of the real estate heir’s confidants.

He has settled on a strategy out of his father’s playbook: a strong counter-attack.

He released the emails himself – although just minutes before they were set to be published by The New York Times – and appeared on Hannity’s program to defend himself in a typically Trump-friendly space.