Senate Judiciary Committee Releases Transcripts Of Interviews With Participants Of Trump Tower Meeting

The Hill reports:

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday morning released the transcripts from a slate of interviews with participants of the now-infamous Trump Tower meeting in June of 2016. Among the transcripts is the panel’s interview of President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who accepted the meeting with a woman described as a Russian government lawyer offering political dirt on Hillary Clinton. The meeting has become a flashpoint in the roiling speculation surrounding Trump and Moscow. The White House and Trump Jr. staunchly defended the June 2016 meeting as appropriate but offered evolving explanations of its purpose.

The New York Times reports:

Six months after the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Trump campaign officials and a self-described Kremlin informant, an intermediary contacted Donald J. Trump’s office asking for a follow-up, according to documents released on Wednesday by a Senate committee.

The intermediary, Rob Goldstone, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he proposed a second meeting between the Russian lawyer, Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, and members of Mr. Trump’s team in November 2016. He said he contacted Mr. Trump’s longtime executive assistant at the behest of Aras Agalarov, a Russia-based billionaire who knows President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia personally.

The follow-up overture is one of the kernels of new information contained in thousands of pages of testimony and exhibits released by the committee, which has been conducting one of the investigations into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russians. Mr. Agalarov also pushed for the initial get-together, which was organized on the premise that Ms. Veselnitskaya would deliver incriminating information on Hillary Clinton to support Mr. Trump’s campaign.