WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he was unaware of his
son Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting last year with a Russian lawyer at the
heart of
a White House controversy, telling Reuters he only learned of it a couple of
days ago.
Asked if he
knew that his son was meeting with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in
June last year, Trump said in a White House interview: “No, that I didn’t know
until a couple of days ago when I heard about this.”
Trump Jr.
eagerly agreed to meet the woman he was told was a Russian government lawyer
who might have damaging information about Democratic rival Hillary Clinton as
part of Moscow's official support for his father's presidential election
campaign, according to emails the son released on Tuesday.
In the
interview, Trump said he did not fault his son for holding the meeting. "I
think many people would have held that meeting," the president said.
The emails
were the most concrete evidence that Trump campaign officials welcomed Russian
help to win the 2016 election, a subject that has cast a cloud over Trump's
presidency and prompted investigations by the U.S. Justice Department and
Congress.
In
Wednesday's interview, Trump also said he directly asked Russian President
Vladimir Putin if he was involved in what U.S. intelligence says was Russian
meddling in the presidential campaign and that Putin had insisted he was not.
Trump said
he spent the first 20 or 25 minutes of his more than two-hour meeting with
Putin last Friday in Germany on the election meddling subject.
"I
said, did you do it? And he said no, I did not. Absolutely not. I then asked
him a second time in a totally different way. He said absolutely not,"
Trump said.
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