CNN commentator David Axelrod has expressed skepticism that President Trump did not know about his son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer to discuss Hillary Clinton during the campaign.
CNN commentator David Axelrod has expressed skepticism that President Trump did not know about his son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer to discuss Hillary Clinton during the campaign.
During an interview on the network’s program 'New Day' Friday, he said, “It’s really hard for me to believe that Don Jr. was acting on information and a meeting arranged by people who were known to Donald Trump, former business partners of Donald Trump, with connections to the Russian regime and to Putin, and had a meeting that included Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, the two top figures in his campaign, and nobody told Trump.”
Axelrod added, “We know this about the Trump operation--it was tight, it was small, and Donald Trump was at the center of it. The fact that no one would come to him and say ‘hey, we just got a tip that we may have some information that could really be dynamite in this campaign’ seems implausible to me.”
According to Axelrod, the president has given conflicting accounts of when he was told about the emails setting up the meeting, but a more important question for investigators will be “whether he knew about the meeting in the first place.”
Both the president and his son have denied that the senior Trump had been informed about the discussion ahead of time; on July 9, Trump Jr. issued a statement to ABC News which noted, in part, “My father knew nothing of the meeting or these events.”
And during a Reuters interview published on July 12, President Trump said, “No, that I didn’t know until a couple of days ago when I heard about this.”
However, the liberal media outlet ThinkProgress is reporting that he later seemed to refer to previous knowledge about the meeting to a group of reporters but continued to deny knowing it was to collect information on Clinton.
Trump has publicly defended his son, calling the speculation about his actions “the greatest Witch Hunt in political history.”
