'A lot of people meet with Russian people,' says Trump's lawyer, so Trump Jr.'s meeting is 'not that unusual'

(Image credit: CNN/Screenshot)

published 16 July 2017

In a CBS Face the Nation interview Sunday, attorney Jay Sekulow of President Trump's legal team said Trump himself "was not aware of" Donald Trump Jr.'s 2016 meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer "until, really, right before it all broke" — and is now not aware of any other meetings between members of his campaign and anyone with ties to the Russian government.

However, while speaking with host Jake Tapper on CNN's State of the Union, Sekulow seemed to allow that other meetings could have happened without the president's knowledge. There are no other meetings "that I know of," he said, "but Donald Trump Jr. said 'not in the context of formal meetings.' He said he may have met with Russian people. A lot of people meet with Russian people, so that's not unusual."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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