Hillary Clinton says the president’s son’s latest explanation for his meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer is an ‘absurd lie.’
Donald Trump Jr. told Senate investigators he was assessing Clinton’s ‘fitness’ for office when he agreed to see a Russian lawyer whom he’d been told had damaging information on the former secretary of state.
This was after he said in a statement that the meeting was about adoption, only to admit later, as his communications with a go-between were published, that he was seeking dirt on Clinton.
Clinton said this morning on Today of Trump Jr’s new claim, ‘It’s ridiculous. It’s another absurd lie to cover up what really was going on, which I hope we finally uncover and understand.’
Hillary Clinton says the president’s son’s latest explanation for his meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer is an ‘absurd lie.’
Don Jr appeared before investigators last week on Capitol Hill to discuss his June 2016 meeting with a group of Russians, including lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.
‘To the extent they had information concerning the fitness, character or qualifications of a presidential candidate, I believed that I should at least hear them out,’ he said in a leaked copy of his prepared remarks. ‘Depending on what, if any, information they had, I could then consult with counsel to make an informed decision as to whether to give it further consideration.’
The president’s son says, ‘The meeting provided no meaningful information and turned out not to be about what had been represented.’
President Trump has vehemently denied having any dealings business or otherwise with Russia in response to charges that this campaign may have colluded with Vladimir Putin’s government to sink Clinton.
Committees in Congress and a special counsel housed in the Department of Justice are looking at the veracity of those claims.
The topic came up as Clinton made the rounds this morning on television. She is promoting her election memoir, What Happened.
Clinton previously told USA Today that she is ‘convinced’ Trump’s associates communicated with the Russian government and had ‘an understanding of some sort.’
‘I’m convinced of it,’ Clinton said of collusion. ‘I happen to believe in the rule of law and believe in evidence, so I’m not going to go off and make all kinds of outrageous claims. But if you look at what we’ve learned since, it’s pretty troubling.’
Pushed by this morning by Today host Matt Lauer to say that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia with the knowledge of the candidate to steal the election, Clinton said she cannot know if that’s true.
That’s why there’s an ongoing Department of Justice Investigation, she commented.
Donald Trump Jr. told Senate investigators he was assessing Clinton’s ‘fitness’ for office when he agreed to see a Russian lawyer whom he’d been told had damaging information on the former secretary of state
Clinton did, however, bring up Trump associate Roger Stone’s claim on Twitter that her campaign chair, John Podesta, would some have his time in ‘the barrel,’ days before WikiLeaks released his emails. ‘How would he have known that?’ she said.
‘If I had been elected and this had come to light … I would have stopped at nothing to make sure this never happened again to anybody,’ Clinton stated.
Clinton retraced the litany of external causes she blames for her defeat in her first live interview since the election on ‘Today’ this morning.
As in her new memoir, ‘What Happened,’ Clinton put former FBI Director James Comey at the top of the list, citing his intervention, which ultimately uncovered nothing new, as the ‘determining factor’ in her loss to Donald Trump.
‘It stopped my momentum. It drove voters from me,’ Clinton said Wednesday.
The FBI had come into possession of a laptop which had Clinton emails because of an unrelated investigation into disgraced ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner, who is married to top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. The two are separated.
The cache ended up including Clinton emails that had gone to Abedin that ended up on Weiner’s computer, which the FBI was looking at as part of its probe into Weiner’s online contacts with an underage girl.
Clinton says former FBI Director James Comey ‘was fired for the wrong reason’ by President Trump. ‘He should not have been fired for Russia,’ Clinton said, going beyond what investigators have posited
‘He should have been disciplined, whether or not fired, that’s not for me to say, but he should have been disciplined for the way that he behaved on the email investigation,’ she said
Clinton told Lauer and co-host Savannah Guthrie that had it not been ‘for that intervention, I would have won.’
She learned about it aboard her campaign plane.
‘I was stunned to be honest. I didn’t know what to think about it because I knew there was nothing there,’ she said. ‘I feel very strongly that he went way beyond his role in doing what he did,’ Clinton said.
She said later in the interview that Comey ‘was fired for the wrong reason’ by President Trump.
‘He should not have been fired for Russia,’ Clinton said, going beyond what investigators have posited. ‘He should have been disciplined, whether or not fired, that’s not for me to say, but he should have been disciplined for the way that he behaved on the email investigation,’ she said.
President Trump says he fired Comey because the law enforcement official was bad at his job, although he has also acknowledged that he had Russia on his mind when he did it.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said in the memo the White House leaned on to fire Comey that he ‘cannot defend the Director’s handling of the conclusion of the investigation of Secretary Clinton’s emails.’
The reason he gave then: ‘The director was wrong to usurp the Attorney General’s authority on July 5, 2016, and announce his conclusion that the case should be closed without prosecution.’