Donald Trump Jr. will likely testify in public this fall about a 2016 meeting he attended with campaign officials and a lawyer who turned out to have Kremlin connections.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley told CNN on Thursday that it’s a foregone conclusion.
Grassley and ranking committee member Dianne Feinstein have been tussling over the terms of re-interviewing Trump Jr. following his closed-door interview last month. Feinstein and other Democrats have been demanding a public airing of what they heard.
‘Obviously, Feinstein wants to do it, and I think there’s no way of avoiding it,’ Grassley said.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley has said Donald Trump Jr. will likely have to testify publicly about a Trump Tower meeting that included a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer
Trump Jr., shown with his family in New York City, represents one thread in a tangled investigation into alleged Russian interference with the 2016 U.S. presidential election
Feinstein predicted two weeks ago that ‘it will be this fall. I know that for sure.’
Separately, the Senate Intelligence Committee is planning to meet with Trump Jr. soon in a secretive classified session as it probes the same controversial meeting.
Don Trump Jr. has already testified behind closed doors but will likely have to repeat the performance in public
‘Before this is over with, we will know everything about the Don Jr. meeting,’ Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr told CNN.
‘We haven’t interviewed everybody yet. … There are still some individuals who might have participated in that meeting that we have yet to get in.’
Burr said Trump Jr. has voluntarily provided information top his committee, but he would have been subpoenaed otherwise.
On Sept. 7, the president’s eldest son told Judiciary Committee lawyers during a five-hour grilling that he attended the 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in New York City because he hoped it would yield information about Democrat Hillary Clinton’s ‘fitness, character or qualifications’ to be president.
In a prepared statement, he described the get-together with publicist Rob Goldstone, Russian-Azerbaijani singer-songwriter Emin Agalarov, Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya, then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, the future president’s son-in-law.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, shown talking gun control on Wednesday, is pushing hard for a public spectacle where Democrats can grill the president’s eldest son
In an email, Trump recalled, Goldstone ‘suggested that someone had ‘official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary [Clinton] and her dealings with Russia’ and that the information would be ‘very useful’ to the campaign.’
‘I was somewhat skeptical of his outreach,’ he said Thursday, since he knew Goldstone only as a pop music promoter.
‘As it later turned out, my skepticism was justified. The meeting provided no meaningful information and turned out not to be about what had been represented.’
Instead, Trump said, the meeting quickly detoured into a discussion of the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law targeting Russian officials thought to be behind the 2009 death of Russian tax accountant Sergei Magnitsky in a Moscow prison. In retaliation for the law, Vladimir Putin’s regime discontinued a program that had allowed Americans to adopt Russian children.
Lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was expected to deliver dirt on Hillary Clinton, Don Jr. has said, but used the 2016 meeting to advocate for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act
Trump maintained last month that the June 2016 meeting quickly disintegrated after ‘Ms. Veselnitskaya pivoted and began talking about the adoption of Russian children by U.S. citizens.’
That parallels his first statements on the matter, which he made publicly two months ago.
‘It was clear to me that her real purpose in asking for the meeting all along was to discuss Russian adoptions and the Magnitsky Act,’ he said of Veselnitskaya.
‘At this point, Jared excused himself from the meeting to take a phone call. I proceeded to quickly and politely end the meeting by telling Ms. Veselnitskaya that because my father was a private citizen there did not seem to be any point to having this discussion. She thanked us for our time and everyone left the conference room.’
‘As we walked out, I recall Rob coming over to me to apologize,’ Trump Jr. said then.