The political world was rocked last summer when it came out that Donald Trump Jr. and other top Trump staffers had met with Kremlin-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in Trump Tower in an effort to obtain Russian government sourced disparaging information on Hillary Clinton.
Now, the lawyer who participated in that meeting and angered Trump Jr. by not having the information he desired has reiterated a relevant tidbit of information. According to comments she made speaking to NBC, she met briefly with Ivanka Trump as she was leaving Trump Tower on the day of the meeting back in 2016, although she was not sure about the woman’s identity who she exchanged brief pleasantries with.
A separate source apparently speaking to NBC confirmed that the woman Veselnitskaya spoke with was, in fact, Ivanka Trump.
The NBC report about this matter comes just a short time after the Los Angeles Times reported that Special Counsel for the Russia investigation Robert Mueller was interested in this very interaction. Besides the lawyer, Ivanka Trump also exchanged pleasantries with Russian lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, who also attended the meeting.
While Mueller’s team has reportedly been seeking to pin down every detail associated with the meeting, investigators are concurrently very interested in why the president apparently helped draft the Trump team’s initial response to the revelation of the meeting’s existence. That initial response was a lie, claiming that the meeting was only about potentially restarting American adoptions of Russian children although Trump Jr. went into it seeking dirt on Hillary Clinton.
As the LA Times put it:
‘Some defense lawyers involved in the case view Mueller’s latest push as a sign that investigators are focusing on possible obstruction of justice by Trump and several of his closest advisors for their statements about the politically sensitive meeting, rather than for collusion with the Russians.’
Mueller has already nabbed two associates of the president on similar charges, with both former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos pleading guilty to lying to the FBI.
If the Trump team wanted their secret pushes for improved relation with Russia to remain secret, they should have never made the pushes in the first place. It doesn’t get to become legal to lie and obstruct justice just because the president says so — and it really does seem as though the president seems to think otherwise, having, for example, apparently participated in the drafting of the initial deceptive statement about Trump Jr.’s 2016 Trump Tower meeting.
As another example, back in December, the question was raised of whether or not Trump knew Flynn had lied to the FBI in the weeks before he got around to firing him for the then-stated reason of lying to Mike Pence, since a tweet seemed to imply as such — but a Trump lawyer followed that tweet up with a claim that he’d actually been the one to post it.
It’s not as though it would be that far fetched to suggest that the president orchestrated the misleading statement about the 2016 Trump Tower meeting. He makes stuff up with no apparent inhibitions to the point that he’s literally been said to have set a record for the most lies told by a first year president.
Featured Image via EUGENE HOSHIKO/AFP/Getty Images
