WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump's eldest son told a Senate committee Thursday he was open to receiving information about Hillary Clinton's "fitness, character or qualifications" in a meeting with a Russian lawyer last year.
However, Donald Trump Jr. insisted he nor anyone else he knows colluded with any foreign government during the presidential campaign.
His description of a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower, delivered in an opening statement at the outset of a closed-door Senate Judiciary Committee staff interview, provided his most detailed account of an encounter that has attracted the attention of congressional investigators and special counsel Robert Mueller.
It is also the first known instance of Trump Jr. giving his version of the meeting in a setting that could expose him to legal jeopardy. It's a crime to lie to Congress.
Multiple congressional committees and Mueller's team of prosecutors are investigating whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to influence the outcome of the election. A grand jury used by Mueller as part of his investigation has already heard testimony about the meeting, which besides Trump Jr., included the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his then-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.
Trump Jr. spoke to the committee for about five hours, leaving midafternoon out of view of reporters.
In Thursday's prepared remarks, which were obtained by the Associated Press, Trump Jr. sought to explain emails he released two months ago that showed him agreeing to the meeting, which had been described as part of a Russian government effort to help his father's campaign.
In his new statement, he said he was skeptical of the outreach by music publicist Rob Goldstone, who said he had information that could be damaging to Clinton. However, Trump Jr. said he thought he "should listen to what Rob and his colleagues had to say."
"To the extent they had information concerning the fitness, character or qualifications of a presidential candidate, I believed that I should at least hear them out," Trump Jr. said in the statement.
At one point during the email exchange, Trump Jr. had told Goldstone, "If it's what you say I love it especially in the summer."
Trump Jr. sought to explain that remark Thursday by saying it was "simply a colloquial way of saying that I appreciated Rob's gesture."
That mirrored his previous statements that sought to dismiss the meeting as a bust. He said the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, gave vague information about possible foreign donations to the Democratic Party but then quickly changed the subject to a sanctions law, known as the Magnitsky Act, which the Russian government opposes.