but first we now know at least eight people attended that june 2016 meeting at trump tower with the president s son. that s several more than donald trump jr. had initially disclosed. one of the new attendees a russian american lobbyist accused of being a super bowl 50 ye a soviet counterintelligence. reporter: despite donald trump jr. s insis sentence he disclosed everything he knew about the meeting there were several e-mails released tuesday. this is everything. reporter: now news that the russian american lobbiest was also in attendance. he says he was in the room for the 20 to 30 minute meeting with trump s eldest son with veselnitskaya.
is the distraction that the white house is pointing at in order to deflect attention from donald trump jr. s russia meeting. these two things are not the same. one on the russian side is a coordinated top down effort and authorized by the president of the russian federation himself vladimir putin which involves a massive campaign of hacking, releasing information, propaganda, fake news, intelligence operations, information operations, you name it. then on the other side you have one meeting or maybe one or two meetings with one person in the ukranian embassy and one person who worked with the dnc. it s not equal. it s a distraction. it doesn t mean that that meeting was above board. it just means that we shouldn t let that divert our attention from what the story here is, which is a massive unprecedented state sponsored state coordinated and highly effective campaign to interfere with our
meeting. the british publicist wrote this to donald trump jr. two days before. i will send the two names of people meeting with you for security when i have them later today. no e-mail producing those names were ever produced by don jr. my son is a wonderful young man. he took a meeting with a russian lawyer, not a government lawyer, but a russian lawyer. it was a short meeting. reporter: president trump defended hid son while speaking in paris but continues to insist he didn t know anything about the meeting until several days before don jr. s e-mails were released. counselor to the president kellyanne conway seemed to suggest that more evidence was needed. the goal posts have been moved. we were promised systemic hard evidence of systemic sustained furtive collusion. reporter: the scramble to respond to the details trickling out may have exposed some white
there were subsequent statements that changed the story entirely and now even today we are still learning more about this meeting. if he would have had a communications professional running this show, i bet it would have been a different outcome. jim, with one quick note on this. the other factor, there are a lot of different communications traps in the white house. they represent different people. jared kushner has his own little world. we re going to get to a point very soon where everybody is going to be trying to protect themselves. they are not going to be driving toward the same message, and that is going to create even more chaos. and david axelrod, as a former white house insider, when you hear stories like the one we have at cnn, because of these multiple statements and multiple explanations the white house has put out, they now potentially exposed white house aides in this process when it comes to the special counsel investigation. what does that do to people on the insid
i was not an intelligence officer, never. he also told the post he was born in russia and became a u.s. citizen in 2009. his lobbying effort which he did on behalf of the russian lawyer veselnitskaya was aimed at repealing the magnitsky act which sanctions russians accused of human rights abuses. a complaint filed against him with the department of justice claims that effort was on behalf of the kremlin. i spoke earlier today with gop congressman adam kinzinger and he made a point to me, jim, many intelligence officials made as well. when russia is doing intelligence operations they don t necessarily deploy people in uniforms, right, with kgb name tags, et cetera. in fact, they don t do that. they use what are called cut outs. they use people tied to the kremlin, former military officers, lobbyists, et cetera. that doesn t establish that that s exactly what this meeting was, but it fits a pattern. and that s something that both democrats and republicans on the investigative committee