President Donald Trump speaks during a rally Thursday Aug. 2 2018 at Mohegan Sun Arena at Casey Plaza in Wilkes Barre Pa
President Trump has admitted that the goal of a June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower between a Kremlin-connected lawyer and Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., was to get dirt on Hillary Clinton.
President Donald Trump on Sunday appeared to change his story about a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower that is pivotal to the special counsel's investigation. Trump claimed that the meeting was "totally legal and done all the time in politics", adding that he had no knowledge about it at the time.
He concluded by further distancing himself from the meeting his son arranged, writing, "I did not know about it!"
And as Trump and his allies have tried to discredit the probe, a new talking point has emerged: that even if that meeting was held to collect damaging information, none was provided and "collusion" - Trump's go-to description of what Mueller is investigating - never occurred. They described the statement, which had not mentioned that the Russian lawyer was expected to bring damaging information about Clinton, as "short but accurate".
But here's the thing: This is a tweet about how the Trump Tower meeting was totally fine - nothing illegal to see here.
On Sunday morning, Trump responded to reports in the Washington Post and on CNN that he was concerned Donald Jr. could be in legal trouble.
While Trump has claimed since taking office that "no collusion" occurred between his campaign and Russia and that Mueller was conducting a "witch hunt", Trump's acceptance of Russian help has been out in the open since the final month of the 2016 campaign.
Donald Jr initially said in a statement to The New York Times that the meeting was "primarily" about American adoptions of Russian children.
On Sunday, US media including the Washington Post, CNN and AP reported that Mr Trump was anxious Donald Trump Jr could be in legal trouble because of the 9 June 2016 meeting with Ms Veselnitskaya.
Manafort is now on trial for unrelated bank and tax fraud charges as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, and Sekulow said that to his knowledge, Trump Jr.is not the target of a federal probe stemming from the meeting.
Any legal battle over whether the president can be forced to testify could go all the way to the US Supreme Court, the lawyer, Jay Sekulow, said on ABC's This Week show. "When you look at a meeting, George, that took place ... now two years ago, the question is, 'What law, statute or rule or regulation's been violated?' Nobody's pointed to one".
The president's past comments decrying the press as an "enemy of the people" have incited anger among supporters at Trump rallies, and have been condemned by the United Nations as "strategic" and non-factual attacks that "increase the risk of journalists being targeted with violence".
In another, he expressed frustration with both the media and Mueller's probe.
Trump called the Post report "a complete fabrication".
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