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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
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Post Says Trump Dictated Son’s Statement About Russian Meeting

President Donald Trump personally dictated the statement his son Donald Trump Jr. used to misrepresent his meeting with a Russian attorney and others in July, the Washington Post reported Monday night.

WASHINGTON (CN) – President Donald Trump personally dictated the statement his son Donald Trump Jr. used to misrepresent his meeting with a Russian attorney and others in July, the Washington Post reported Monday night.

The Post reported the new twist in the story that won’t go away just before 8 p.m. Monday, attributing the information to “multiple people with knowledge of the deliberations.”

Those sources said that while Trump was flying home on Air Force One from the Group of 20 Summit in Germany on July 8, he overruled his advisers’ plan on how to respond to the then-new allegations about the Russian meeting, and “personally dictated a statement in which Trump Jr. said that he and the Russian lawyer had ‘primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children,’” according to the Post.

It has been widely reported for three weeks that discussion of the adoption program was a thin cover for discussion of economic sanctions against Russia. President Vladimir Putin was angered by Obama-era U.S. economic sanctions known as the Magnitsky Act of 2012, to punish Russia for the death in prison of Russian attorney Sergei Magnitsky. Putin retaliated by ending a program for U.S. citizens to adopt Russian children.

In the days after July 8 this year, Donald Trump Jr. provided multiple, varying accounts of his meeting with the Russians, and eventually acknowledged having received emails from a Russian source who promised him damning information about Hillary Clinton during his father’s 2016 presidential campaign.

The Post story on Monday came after a rough week for President Trump, which culminated in his firing of new communications director Anthony Scaramucci on Monday after only 10 days on the job, and a tweet from the president assuring his followers that there is “no WH chaos!” in the White House.

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