a full and accurate statement. jeff zeleny, let me pivot to you at the white house and to chalian s point, we ve heard out of the president s own mouth, both when he was with macron in france and at the new york times, both times saying, yes, the meeting in addition to talking about adoption was also about opposition research and who wouldn t go to that kind of meeting. jeff zeleny, what do you think. reporter: exactly. i mean, what we learned today from this press briefing, brooke, is that there are still so many more questions about that flight on july 8 when the president was flying back from hamburg, germany, at the end of the g20 summit to washington when the new york times was first reporting about that meeting that now we ve talked so much about. that meeting back on june 9, 2016. now, sarah huckabee sanders is confirming that the president weighed in, in her words, but that s in direct contradiction to what the president s own lawyers said. so now we are left to wonder,
is alleging that the white house and the president, knowing that this story was false, pushed it out. right. so, sean spicer met with this wealthy republican businessman and this fox news contributor and investigate rod wheeler. he just confirmed to us that they actually did talk about the seth rich case during that meeting but he characterized it as a ten-minute meeting and he did it out of respect for someone who goes on tv and defends the president quite a bit. and it s also worth noting, though, that fox is pushing back strongly on this, butowski is pushing back strongly. both of them say this lawsuit s not true and it s full of errors, but the claims are quite explosive. this is, david chalian, the definition of fake news, if you want to go there. if the allegations are correct. this, you know, the story s entirely false. this poor family has been saying to fox news fox retracted the story, but again, the allegations that this went as high as the white house, the push this f
suggestion, like any father would do. did he not know what the we ll follow up on that. was he aware at the time that don junior had a meeting that was based on the pretext that he would be promised information that was never about hillary clinton when he suggested that the statement only say that the meeting was primarily about russian adoption policy? like i said, the statement that was issued was true and there were no inaccuracies in the statement. i think what the bigger question is, everybody wants to try to make this some story about misleading. the only thing i see misleading is a year s worth of stories that have been fuelling a false narrative about this russia collusion and based a phony scandal based on anonymous sources and that s the only thing misleading about this entire process. you guys are focused on a meeting that don junior had no consequence when the democrats actually colluded with a foreign government like ukraine, the democrat-linked firm actually took
what you were talking about, our obsession with russia and the responsibility laying with the clintons, there s a report out today based on a lawsuit that was filed that says that sean spicer met with a campaign donor and a journalist from fox news where they were pushing around this story that seth rich, who was murdered, was perhaps the one responsible for the wikileaks breach. two questions. sean put out a statement, he said it was just a brief meeting. he said the guy didn t know the president. the lawsuit alleges that the president knew about it and had an influence on the story. did the president know about the story pre-publication and did he have an nuaninfluence. the president had no knowledge of the story and it s completely untrue that he or the white house were involved in the story. beyond that, this is ongoing litigation and i will refer you to the actual parties involved. does it disturb you that the press secretary of the united states, you just gave this
mr. donald trump jr. between don junior and his lawyer. i m sure his lawyer was involved. that s how you do it. you know that. to put this on the president, i think, is absolutely incorrect. all right, well, not so according to your reporting. and carol, is it a safe assumption that the president knew details about that trump tower meeting, which then leads to bigger questions about why he wouldn t be forthright from the beginning in that statement. so, the president definitely knew that this meeting was about more than adoptions, and the reason that we found it misleading and very interesting that the president dictated it was because it emphasized, as you may remember, i think, at the top, you were describing the exact quote. it stressed we primarily talk about adoptions, which is true, and the second part emphasizing this was not a campaign issue. you know, detaching it from the campaign is something that is, you know, you can parse it, you