Trump legal team reportedly knew about Trump Jr.'s Russia emails in June
Last month, President Trump's attorneys were told about the email chain from June 2016 between Donald Trump Jr. and Rob Goldstone setting up a meeting for Trump Jr. with a Kremlin-connected attorney, two people with knowledge of the matter told Yahoo News Thursday.
The New York Times reported about the meeting between Trump Jr. and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya last weekend, and on Wednesday, the president told Reuters he first heard about it "two or three days ago." The emails, released by Trump Jr. and the Times on Tuesday, reveal that Trump Jr. agreed to the meeting after learning he would receive information that would "incriminate" Hillary Clinton and was "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." Trump Jr. also invited his father's campaign chairman at the time, Paul Manafort, and Trump's son-in-law and current senior adviser, Jared Kushner, to attend.
Yahoo News reports Trump's chief lawyer in the Russia investigation, Marc Kasowitz, and Alan Garten, executive vice president and chief legal officer of the Trump Organization, found out about the emails in the third week of June, after they were discovered by Kushner's lawyers. Kushner and Manafort were both forwarded an email by Trump Jr. about the meeting, with the subject line reading, "FW: Russia-Clinton-private & confidential," and after his lawyers learned this, Kushner amended his security clearance form for the second time to show the meeting. A Kasowitz spokesman declined to comment to Yahoo News.
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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