2016 ELECTION/DONALD JR/ROBERT MUELLER/RUSSIA INVESTIGATION/TRUMP PEOPLE: “President Trump acknowledged Sunday [8-5-18] that a meeting his son held with a Russian government lawyer in June 2016 was an attempt ‘to get information on’ Democrat Hillary Clinton but defended the encounter as ‘totally legal.’ Mr. Trump and his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. , have repeatedly denied that the president had advance knowledge of the Trump Tower meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with links to the Kremlin. The meeting has come under scrutiny of special counsel Robert Mueller. But the meeting has become a prominent focus in Mr. Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump associates colluded with Russia in 2016 and whether the president and his aides sought to obstruct justice by initially asserting that the meeting focused only on adoptions. Mr. Trump has denied collusion or obstruction, and Moscow has denied election interference. It isn’t clear when the president first learned of the meeting, which took place shortly after Mr. Trump became the presumptive 2016 Republican presidential nominee. In the Sunday morning tweet, Mr. Trump wrote that meetings like this were ‘done all the time in politics’ while reiterating: ‘I did not know about it!’”
–Reid J. Epstein, “Trump Defends Son’s Meeting With Russian Lawyer,” The Wall Street Journal, August 5, 2018 4:29 pm