In the wake of outcry over a meeting Donald Trump Jr. had last year with a Kremlin-linked lawyer two weeks after his father clinched the Republican nomination, the New York Times reported Monday night that Trump Jr. received an email informing him he would receive damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy.
Three sources told the Times that the email message came from Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid reporter who helped organize the June 2016 meeting. Goldstone met Trump Jr. at the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow.
The message indicated that the Russian government was the source of the potentially damaging information against Clinton, according to the Times report.
However, there is no evidence to suggest that it was related to the Russian hacking that resulted in the release of thousands of Democratic emails a week after Trump Jr.’s meeting.
The Times said the meeting will be of interest to the Justice Department and congressional investigators who are examining whether any of President Trump’s associates on his presidential campaign colluded with the Russian government to disrupt the election and sway it in his favor.
Earlier on Monday, Trump Jr. took to Twitter to retweet a few of his father’s messages and attack the media for coverage of the meeting last June, which the Times initially disclosed on Saturday.
Trump Jr. said he attended because he could have potentially received information that was damaging to the Clinton campaign, and mocked the way the media has covered the situation.
“Obviously I’m the first person on a campaign to ever take a meeting to hear info about an opponent … went nowhere but had to listen,” the president’s oldest son wrote.
Trump Jr. said that he met with the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, at the request of an acquaintance [Goldstone] from the Miss Universe pageant.
When they met, he said the lawyer “stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Mrs. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”