It has been more than a year since Donald Trump held his one and only full-fledged news conference as president.
.. President Trump took two questions, both from friendly news outlets, neither of which asked about the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, even though Trump’s former deputy campaign chairman was entering a guilty plea at that very time.
.. Please outline what role you played in drafting your son Donald Trump Jr.’s statement about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting? Did you say that the statement should describe the meeting as being “primarily” about adoption? What was your basis for saying that? When did you become aware of the meeting?
.. Are your taxes still being audited?
President Trump Dictated Don Jr.’s Misleading Statement on His Russia Meeting: Report
There isn’t really a good way to tell the world that you took a meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer after being promised dirt on Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” But Donald Trump Jr. made the revelation that he met with attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya during the campaign even worse when he offered two contradictory explanations in a 24-hour period.
.. This is what he came up with:
It was a short introductory meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to stop by. We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at the time and there was no follow up.
I was asked to attend the meeting by an acquaintance, but was not told the name of the person I would be meeting with beforehand.
.. That explanation would be contradicted and expanded multiple times (eventually it was reported that eight people were in the meeting). And if the Post report is correct, President Trump’s personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow, lied to the press on more than one occasion. He said on Meet the Press, “I do want to be clear — that the president was not involved in the drafting of the statement and did not issue the statement.”
.. “The thing that really strikes me about this is the stupidity of involving the president,” said Peter Zeidenberg, the deputy special prosecutor who probed the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity. “They are still treating this like a family-run business and they have a PR problem … What they don’t seem to understand is this is a criminal investigation involving all of them.”