Donald Trump jnr's decision to publish a transcript of emails he exchanged with British publicist Rob Goldstone marks the latest development in an extraordinary series of events over the past few days.
The latest controversy to beset the Trump administration began within hours of the US president touching down in Washington after the G20 summit on Saturday evening, when the New York Times reported that Mr Trump jnr had met with a Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, in June 2016.
On Sunday morning, the president’s eldest son issued a statement, confirming that the meeting had taken place but stating that the discussion was primarily about an adoption programme.
Here's my statement and the full email chain pic.twitter.com/x050r5n5LQ
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 11, 2017
Second statement
That evening, Mr Trump jnr issued a second statement in which he said that he was told ahead of the meeting that the individual “might have information helpful to the campaign”. However, he said that during the meeting the woman told him that certain individuals connected to
Russia
were helping to fund
Hillary Clinton
and that “it quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information”.
Late on Monday, the New York Times reported that an email had been sent to Mr Trump jnr prior to the June 9th meeting stating the information being offered to him about Hillary Clinton was part of the Russian government's support for his father's campaign. The New York Times did not print the email, but based its story on three unnamed sources.
It appears to have been the New York Times report about the email – and perhaps the chance the newspaper may have been preparing to print the full email – that prompted the president's 39-year-old eldest son to post his email exchange with Mr Goldstone, the man who set up the June 9th meeting, yesterday.
Mr Trump jnr had been regularly tweeting since the newspaper story first broke at the weekend. Yesterday morning he dismissed the media coverage of the June 9th meeting, describing it as a “nonsense meeting”.
NBC interview A few hours later he tweeted the link to the email chain. This also took place shortly after Ms Veselnitskaya
gave an interview with NBC, perhaps another reason why Mr Trump chose to publicise the emails.
In that interview, the Russian lawyer – who it later emerged was described as a government attorney by Mr Goldstone in his emails proposing the meeting to Mr Trump jnr – denied that she had any information about Hillary Clinton, as claimed by Mr Trump in his Sunday evening statement.
She said that Donald Trump jnr had asked her during the meeting whether she had any financial records which might prove that funds used to sponsor the Democratic National Committee were coming from inappropriate sources.
“It is quite possible that maybe they were longing for such information. They wanted it so badly that they could only hear the thought that they wanted,” she said.
Unlike his son, US president Donald Trump was uncharacteristically silent on the controversy on Twitter.
Deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders did deliver a message from the president at a press briefing yesterday, however.
“My son is a high quality person and I applaud his transparency,” the president said.
