Donald Trump Jr. contradicts himself in emails he revealed
Email threat Trump Jr. released don't comport with his own statements
— -- Donald Trump Jr.'s effort at transparency on Tuesday may have backfired.
That's because the email chain he released on Tuesday, which detailed plans for a meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 with someone he was told was a Russian government official with incriminating information on the Clinton campaign, appears to contradict one key narrative he provided about the encounter before those emails became public.
In a statement Donald Trump Jr. made to ABC News on July 9 after the New York Times first broke the story of that meeting, he said he'd never shared the substance of the meeting ahead of time with the other campaign officials who attended: Paul Manafort (then campaign chairman) and Jared Kushner (President Trump's son-in law and now senior adviser). “I asked Jared [Kushner] and Paul [Manafort] to attend, but told them nothing of the substance.”
But that statement doesn't comport with the emails he put out on his own twitter account.
In fact, the emails show Trump forwarded an entire back and forth correspondence about the substance of the meeting and the logistics to both Manafort and Kushner once it had all been set up.
The email chain Trump forwarded provides a detailed conversation between himself and Rob Goldstone, the music publicist responsible for setting up the email thread and conversation. Goldstone tells Trump, among other things, that he could provide "official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia.”
Trump responded to the request for a meeting positively, saying to Goldstone, “if it’s what you say I love it.”
Tuesday morning, he released his email exchange over Twitter, claiming that the release was an attempt “to be totally transparent,” attaching a statement about the communications between himself and Goldstone, in addition to the emails themselves.
A source close to Manafort told ABC News that the campaign manager was forwarded the messages but didn’t read all the way to the bottom of the entire email thread.