Donald Trump Jr. was a guest on Fox News’ “Hannity” on Tuesday to discuss his previously undisclosed meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin.
Host Sean Hannity asked Trump Jr. if he now regretted the meeting that also included Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner and took place in June 2016, two weeks after his father, Donald Trump, landed the Republican nomination for president. It is the first confirmed private meeting between the Russians and Trump’s team.
“In retrospect, I probably would have done things a little differently,” the president’s eldest son told Hannity. “Again, this is before the Russia mania — this is before they were building this up in the press.”
Trump Jr. said he attended the meeting for “opposition research” in hopes of learning damaging information about Hillary Clinton’s possible connection to the Russian government.
“They had something, maybe concrete evidence to all the stories I’d been hearing about — probably underreported for years, not just during the campaign,” he said. “So I think I wanted to hear it out. But really it went nowhere, and it was apparent that wasn’t what the meeting was about.”
According to Trump Jr., father Donald Trump did not know about the sit-down.
“It was just a nothing,” Trump Jr. continued. “There was nothing to tell. I mean, I wouldn’t have even remembered it until you started scouring through this stuff. It was literally just a wasted 20 minutes, which was a shame.”