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5 Aug, 2018 16:07

‘Totally legal’: President defends Donald Jr’s Trump Tower meeting with Russians to get Clinton dirt

‘Totally legal’: President defends Donald Jr’s Trump Tower meeting with Russians to get Clinton dirt

Donald Trump has labelled reports that he is concerned over the legality of his son’s Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer as “fake news”, and said getting dirt on 2016 presidential rival Hillary Clinton was “totally legal.”

The US president took to Twitter on Sunday to call it a “complete fabrication” that he was worried over his son Donald Jr.’s 2016 meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in Trump Tower, which has been used by critics of Trump as evidence that he was involved in alleged “Russian collusion” during the 2016 US Presidential election.

“This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics,” the president said.

He reiterated that he had no prior knowledge of the 20-minute meeting when it happened, adding that “it went nowhere.”

The Trump administration maintains they believed the purpose of the meeting was to get intelligence on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, however, they have since described the meeting as a “waste of time.” Instead Veselnitskaya discussed sanctions placed on Russia under the Magnitsky Act, which affected her clients.

On Sunday, CNN and the Washington Post reported that Trump was becoming increasingly agitated over the possibility that Donald Jr. would become the focus of a probe into alleged Russian meddling, claiming it has fuelled the president’s recent social media attacks on special counsel Robert Mueller.

In his Sunday Twitter series Trump once again wondered why Mueller’s team, that consists of Democrats, is not looking into the impact of the dossier provided by Christopher Steele, a UK spy who was on the FBI’s payroll. In his usual manner Trump called the investigation a "Witch Hunt".

The Mueller investigation, which after over a year has failed to find any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, has since shifted focus away from collusion to looking for evidence that the Trump campaign obstructed justice.

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